https://levelup.gitconnected.com/biggest-crypto-scam-in-history-worth-15-billion-381e97cf2c0f
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
The cryptocurrency that challenged bitcoin. A founder who set out to rewrite the philosophy of cryptocurrency. Here is the story of a woman who scammed the world and then ran away.
One of the biggest scams in history — The Times
Before the unprecedented crypto boom of 2017, there were only a few people who knew about cryptocurrency and blockchain. Bitcoin which was and still is the biggest and best-known cryptocurrency was rising in value every day. From a few cents, it had grown to thousands of dollars per coin.
Investors from all over the world wanted a piece of the pie, no one wanted to miss this once in a lifetime opportunity. During that time, altcoins were being developed mostly on top of Bitcoin. Very few people in the world knew about blockchain in technical terms, the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies. Everyone else looked at it as ‘get rich quick’ scheme.
It was 90s all over again. No one knew what was happening, what they were investing in, and if at all it was real.
Most altcoins were fake. They just had a cool-looking website and a motto of destroying bitcoin. These coins were breathing off the success of bitcoin and had no underlying technology such as blockchain. Their creators wanted to raise money quickly and ‘fake it till you make it’ was the norm.
One such altcoin that gained a lot of attention was One Coin.
Here is a good post by Renee Yang to understand blockchain in simple terms-
For a little technical introduction to blockchain, here is a good post by Jun Wu-
One Coin was founded in 2015 by Dr. Ruja Ignatova. Dr. Ruja claimed One Coin to be better than Bitcoin. In one of her conferences, she shouted, “In two years, nobody will speak about Bitcoin any more!”. Because of her high profile, intelligence, knowledge, and network, people believed in One Coin.
By now you must have realized that all these were lies made in public conferences. In fact, One Coin had no underlying technology, there was no blockchain.
In early October 2016, almost 2 years after One Coin was released, Bjorn Bjercke was offered a job as a CTO of One Coin. He was shocked to know that a so-called cryptocurrency company has been running for 2 years without blockchain.
Now, let’s talk about numbers.
Source: BBC
As I said earlier, most of the investors had no idea what they were investing in, they just cared about the numbers on their screens go up.