United States courthouse building. West Virginia Record
OneCoin’s lawyer, Mark Scott, has been found guilty of laundering $400 million for Ruja Ignatova’s Ponzi scheme, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said in a press release on 21 November.
According to the report, the Manhattan jury decided to give Scott the guilty verdict on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud.
He was suspected of being paid $50 million by Ignatova to perpetrate the scheme, and help her conceal the true ownership and source of the funds.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said that Scott:
“Used his specialized knowledge as an experienced corporate lawyer to set up fake investment funds, which he used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud proceeds. He lined his pockets with over $50 million of the money stolen from victims of the OneCoin scheme. Scott, who boasted of earning ‘50 by 50’ now faces 50 years in prison for his crimes.”
Scott reportedly used an elaborate network of fraudulent private equity investment funds and international tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, to move the funds around and obscure their source of origin.
OneCoin is considered to be one of the crypto industry’s largest exit scams, with the Southern District of New York claiming it had generated an excess of €3.5 billion ($3.7 billion) in sales revenue.
Even though Ignatova still remains at large, her brother, Konstantin Ignatov, was arrested in March 2019, at the Los Angeles International Airport.
Since his arrest, Ignatov has already pleaded guilty of being part in the multi-billion dollar fraud and money laundering scheme. Earlier this month he signed a plea deal with prosecutors, and now faces up to 90 years in prison.