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Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

bbc.co.uk

111–120 of 166 posts

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#111

I torrent a lot of TV shows. And American Greed popped up a lot. I always dismissed the show until they they recently did a ep on the Fyre festival. I consume every bit of media about the Fyre festival. I Watched the ep about it. Then I saw that American greed is actually one of the best shows on TV. So I set Sonarr to grab every episode. It grabbed 114 of them. And I have now watched them all all. But 80% of the epi…

>Then I saw that American greed is actually one of the best shows on TV.

It is:) Over the years I have watched every episode and now have status of "All caught up" Hulu.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That website looks and reads like they’re selling some high end Breitling or Patek Philippe

No not watches, 'quantum' cryptography. More background: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/09/crown_sterlin...

One of the articles mention he speaks at something called CPAK which looks like some psuedo-science new agey non-sense forum: "Conference of Precession and Ancient Knowledge".

https://cpakonline.com/

Robert Grant is listed as a: "Polymath and Expert in Sonic Geometry"

I love this stuff, look at all of the listed "experts" each with books published ("Sacred Cosmology of Ancient Egypt"). Humans are so weird.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#113
I briefly worked for this group of people who were supposed to be launching a new cryptocurrency right at the peak of all the hype. It was promised to be this next generation technology that was going to make everyone involved rich, and it would never drop below $2 USD a coin. It was also supposed to be part of this new paradigm for society that would usher in a Golden Age.

Only problem was, every single thing I mentioned above was complete nonsense. The cryptocurrency didn't actually exist, and despite having multiple "crypto experts", nobody really understood how a blockchain actually worked. I quit after I started to see what was really going on, though everything smelled fishy from the beginning.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#114
post #54
post #14

>Another tip he gives us is to find out where she has been on her yacht. We should try to get the tracker off it, he says, and he doesn't appear to be joking. I explain that this is probably beyond my abilities (apart from being illegal) Uh, why would this be illegal? Is flightaware illegal? Or the yacht tracking sites?

Yacht nav systems can log where you have been, but a small minority of ships will permanently log their location somewhere publicly accessible. To get the data you'd need to get onto the yacht to access the nav system.

Lots of yacht spotting sites and other OSINT sources you could use to track a vessel that doesn’t broadcast its location.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#115
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be common with BBC articles lately. I read their tennis pages often, and it amazes me how often they get the winner of a match wrong! It's almost as if the reviewer has no context when checking through the article.

Probably AI written content.

I don't think the content is AI generated, but I know for sure their Brexit articles get a tonne of bots spamming the comments section.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#116
post #58

My experience with OneCoin is that people who were involved in it were shady and trying get less shady people on the board. That was back in 2016 / 2017. At least in Eastern Europe, it was going like this (translation): The "master scammer" created a platform for "wannabe scammers" to scam others. But the master is the master. Typical ponzi scheme: everybody knew but they were hoping the get bigger sucker.

My question, are there innocent stupid people? Or did every investor want a get rich quick sheme?

So many people have said to me "you're into computers" how do they get into this Bitcoin thing. I said there's a lot too it and explain any of it their eyes glaze over. They just want to put down $100 and make millions in a week with no effort.

I remember when Bitcoin was cheap as hell I think it was $1 bought you 1,000 Bitcoins so I am no Bitcoin expert or I would be a billionaire. Yes I dream of having some on an old hard drive (I'm sure we all do).

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#117
> "I did the calculation how many coins we needed to become the richest person on the planet," Igor says. "I said to Andreea, 'We need to build it up to 100 million coins, because when this coin goes to €100 and we have 100 million, we are richer than Bill Gates.' It's mathematic. It's easy as that."

There is an argument to be made here that someone who is that irresponsible, or frankly stupid, has only themselves to blame.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#118
post #100
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was my thought as well. It’s a shame they killed her off, she seemed like a nice woman despite it all. Who knows if that kind of life was even worth it. Seems like by the time you find out, you’re already in too deep and have to keep going.

Nothing I have read about her makes her sound nice. She seems like a materialistic serial scammer.

You guys need to hear this wiretap of her speaking with Gilbert Armenta, the "international money launderer" and *boyfriend.

Note: Both are married to other people. And FBI arrested Armenta and made him an informant. Ruja moved into the apartment underneath him and had a hole drilled through the ceiling so she could spy on him talking with his wife. It was due to this that she discovered later that he was a mole! And within the month, she fled into oblivion.

I was told by former leaders that she definitely put a lot of money into bitcoin, herself. Yet, in 2015 she told her victims that they could have their "coins frozen" (novel idea on a "blockchain," I know) if they "promoted any other projects or coins." She said that it would be as if a Coca-Cola driver was seen drinking Pepsi on the job.

She was such a greedy bitch that she didn't allow her victims to even put money in any real crypto. She wanted ALL their investment.

AUDIO: https://soundcloud.com/innercitypress/onecoins-ruja-ignatova...

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#119
post #58

My experience with OneCoin is that people who were involved in it were shady and trying get less shady people on the board. That was back in 2016 / 2017. At least in Eastern Europe, it was going like this (translation): The "master scammer" created a platform for "wannabe scammers" to scam others. But the master is the master. Typical ponzi scheme: everybody knew but they were hoping the get bigger sucker.

My question, are there innocent stupid people? Or did every investor want a get rich quick sheme?

Philosophically, Onecoin plagiarized so much from early bitcoin (ie., "bank the unbanked," "take money away from the banking structures & Govt.'s," etc).

Victims had mostly no tech background, whatsoever, and had been told that "decentralized" meant crime and anonymity, which they perceived as a bad thing which Onecoin's "centralized model" prevented.

They didn't know the usefulness or cruciality of even a block explorer.

So, for some, there were "fundamental reasons" for a cryptocurrency (sic) like Onecoin, in addition to the speculative nature of (real) cryptos, in general.

Re: Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished

#120
post #66

The parent scam company, OneLife, still has a webpage up: https://www.onelife.eu/en however its official denial of OneCoin wrong-doing is a 503. Fortunately, that denial, a glorious work on its own, can be seen in cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

Sadly OneLife seems to be powering on. The most depressing part of listening to that podcast was the last episode, when they went to somewhere in Africa (I forget where), and talked to people getting caught up in it. It's spread around the world and is drawing people in everywhere.
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