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Jamie Bartlett on Greed, Fortune and the Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen

How organised crime, influencer culture and hype around cryptocurrencies duped some of the world's poorest people

In 2016, on stage at Wembley Arena in front of thousands of adoring fans, Dr Ruja Ignatova promised her followers a financial revolution. The future, she said, belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And the Oxford-educated, self-styled cryptoqueen promised that the cryptocurrency she had created – OneCoin – would not only earn its investors untold fortunes but also change the world.

A year later investors had bought more than $4 billion-worth of OneCoin. The true believers lived all over the world – in the USA, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Yemen, the UK, Brazil and beyond. But in October 2017 Ruja Ignatova disappeared from public view, and it slowly became clear to her followers that her revolutionary cryptocurrency was in fact one of the biggest scams in history.

In June 2022 Jamie Bartlett came to Intelligence Squared to tell the shocking story of Dr Ruja and OneCoin. He drew from his new book The Missing Cryptoqueen to explain how organised crime, influencer culture and hype around cryptocurrencies combined to dupe some of the world’s poorest people into thinking they had discovered a route out of poverty. Bartlett also discussed the broader questions around cryptocurrency’s future and his ongoing hunt to find the cryptoqueen, who has been in hiding for five years and was recently added to EUROPOL’s most wanted list.


Speakers

Speakers

Jamie Bartlett

Author and expert on the politics of the internet. The Missing Cryptoqueen is his latest book


Author and expert on the politics of the internet. He is Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, a collaboration between the University of Sussex and the think tank Demos. He is the author of The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World, and The People vs Tech. He presented the BBC series ‘Secrets of Silicon Valley’ and in 2019 he wrote and presented the hit BBC podcast series ‘The Missing Cryptoqueen’, which exposed the biggest ever cryptocurrency scandal. He has also turned the story into a book, which will be published in June 2022.

Layla Begum

Victim of the OneCoin scandal and business development executive.


Victim of the OneCoin scandal and business development executive.
Chair

Carl Miller

Research Director at Demos and author of The Death of The Gods: The New Global Power Grab


Research Director and co-founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at the think tank Demos. He presented the BBC's flagship technology programme 'Click' and is author of The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab which examines how new technologies change power dynamics in our societies. He was recently appointed to Chatham House's taskforce on Responsible AI.