So-called CryptoQueen Ruja Ignatova and her security adviser, Frank Schneider, liquidated Dubai assets despite being charged in the U.S. for their alleged roles in a $4bn fraud. The whereabouts of both is unknown.
Key Findings
- Leaked Dubai property data reveals Ignatova’s Dubai penthouse apartment was sold in late 2019, two years after her OneCoin cryptocurrency fraud collapsed leading to U.S. charges against her.
- Schneider purchased Dubai real estate after the OneCoin scandal became public. His role in OneCoin was not publicly known at the time.
- Schneider’s apartment was sold for $2.3 million in January 2022, even though he was under house arrest in France battling extradition to the U.S.
- Schneider escaped and is missing, but reporters found clues that he may be in Indonesia.
Several of Frank Schneider’s former associates in one of the biggest cryptocurrency scams in history were facing criminal charges, and some were on the run. But if the former Luxembourg intelligence officer was concerned that the net was closing in on him too, it didn’t affect his exercise routine.
A fitness app recorded Schneider’s March 21, 2020, bike ride around the circumference of the luxury Palm Jumeirah development in Dubai.
Schneider had purchased an apartment there for $2 million in early 2018. Ruja Ignatova, the alleged mastermind behind the massive OneCoin crypto scam, had bought a penthouse in 2015 in the same gated community –– an artificial array of islands shaped like a palm tree inside a circular halo.
Ignatova and Schneider had begun working together after Schneider left his job as a director of operations for Luxembourg’s spy service, and started his own corporate intelligence firm. Schneider allegedly aided in “evading law enforcement investigations” and helped in “managing the scheme’s proceeds,” according to a U.S. indictment against him.
By the time Schneider took his mid-day bike ride in 2020, Ignatova had disappeared –– some reports say she was murdered –– and OneCoin had collapsed, costing investors over $4 billion.
Schneider had not yet been publicly linked to the scandal when he purchased his apartment in 2018, a year after OneCoin collapsed. However, leaked Dubai property records show his and Ignatova’s properties were sold after they had already been charged with criminal offenses following OneCoin’s collapse, raising questions over Dubai’s enforcement of anti-money laundering rules.
Ignatova had purchased her 500-square-meter apartment through a shell company. A title deed obtained by OCCRP’s partner, paper trail media, shows the company sold the property in December 2019, by which time Ignatova was wanted by prosecutors in New York — and possibly even dead.
Schneider had already been detained when his Palm Jumeirah flat sold for $2.3 million in January 2022.
The OneCoin catastrophe was well-known by the time the properties were sold off. Numerous media reports quoted victims describing in detail how Ignatova had duped them into buying her fake cryptocurrency. The BBC traced Ignatova’s rapid rise and spectacular demise in a popular podcast launched in September 2019 called The Missing Cryptoqueen, which included scores of interviews with victims.
Ignatova and Schneider were able to carry out the real estate deals despite a United Arab Emirates law in place since 2019 that requires realtors to run background checks on buyers and sellers of properties, and report any suspicious transactions to authorities.
“You need to know the customers you’re dealing with,” said Henry Wyad, Investigations Analyst at Themis, a U.K.- and UAE-based firm that helps clients manage financial crime risks. The law is “explicit” about this, and clearly covers both seller and purchaser, he added.
