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- 1 OneCoin creator Karl Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years of prison and $300 Million in fines.
- 2 The project accumulated over $4 Billion in revenue and the co-founder benefitted with $300 Million.
- 3 Greenwood was arrested in 2018, pleaded guilty in 2022, and now the court sent him to jail.
OneCoin co-founder was finally sentenced after five years of his arrest on charges of carrying out a fraud crypto scheme. Given the infamous scheme, millions of people ended up losing their hard-earned money. At the top, the company had accumulated over $4 Billion in revenue and around half of it was in profits. But the imprisonment and fine worth $300 Million on the scheme’s mastermind should come as a turning point.
The Sweden and United Kingdom citizenship holder, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, was found guilty of executing a purported crypto pyramid scheme and defrauding millions of customers. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York sentenced the culprit to twenty years of imprisonment and imposed a fine of $300 Million.
According to the Attorney’s Office release, Greenwood established OneCoin Limited in 2014 in Sofia, Bulgaria, along with his accomplice Ruja Ignatova, who’s famously known as ‘cryptoqueen’. The company promoted the namesake cryptocurrency alleging great returns to the customers.
Due to the significant sales techniques of Greenwood and reliance on MLM structure resulted in the great success of OneCoin. The initiative took off so well that it accumulated more than $4 Billion in sales. Half of this was pure profit, between the fourth quarter of 2014 and to the fourth quarter of 2016.
One at Top of OneCoin Remained the Most Profitable
The system within the company works as 5% of monthly OneCoin sales is transferred to Greenwood which is the top promoter in the MLM scheme. This way, the alleged crypto fraudster gained $200 Million during the same time. In total, including the profits gained later, he managed to make a significant amount of $300 Million.
The project boasted that OneCoin would bring the ‘financial revolution’ and it would be the “Bitcoin killer.” The claim of investment in the alleged token as a chance of putting money in the ‘next bitcoin’ lured people in abundance.
The hype around the project was nothing but fake as the token had not been trading, it was not mined or validated akin to other crypto assets. Moreover, it did not even have a blockchain network.
As reported, a whopping 3.5 Million people fell prey to the scheme, including users in the United States.
Greenwood was said to spend the investors’ money on his lavish lifestyle and luxuries such as designer clothes, offshore real estate, expensive watches, a luxury yacht, etc. The illegally gained profit was spent over private OneCoin jets for first-class travel and five-star resorts and rented beach villa stays.
OneCoin creator was first arrested by the agencies in Thailand and extradited to the United States in 2018. He pleaded guilty to the charges brought against him in 2022.
Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast, with a major in macroeconomics and minor in business statistics. She believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks, and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning. She frequently researches, and posts content on the top altcoins, their theoretical working principles and technical price predictions.
