OneCoin is a Ponzi scheme promoted as a cryptocoin with a private blockchain. It is promoted by offshore companies OneCoin Ltd (Dubai) and OneLife Network Ltd (Belize), both led by Bulgarian Ruja Ignatova. OneCoin has been described as a Ponzi scheme, both because of how it has been set up and because of many of the people who are central to OneCoin having previously been involved in other such schemes.
Concept
According to OneCoin, its main business is selling educational material for trading. Members are able to buy educational packages ranging from 110 euros to 118,000 euros. Each package includes "tokens" which can be assigned to "mine" OneCoins. OneCoin is said to be mined by servers at two sites in Bulgaria and one site in Hong Kong. Each level (except six and seven), or package, gives new educational material, which is plagiarized from several sources. The company and its recruiters claims that OneCoin doesn't sell cryptocurrency but only educational material. However, in a typical OneCoin recruiting meeting most of the time recruiters talk about investing in cryptocurrency and the educational material is barely even mentioned.original research?
Currently there is no way to exchange onecoins to any other currency. Previous to January 2017 the only way to exchange onecoins to any other currency was OneCoin Exchange, xcoinx, an internal market place for members who had invested more than just a starter package. This service was shutdown without warning in January 2017. While it was functioning, onecoins could only be exchanged for euros, which were placed in a virtual wallet from which they could be requested for wire transfer. The market place had daily selling limits based on which packages the seller had invested in, which greatly limited the amount of onecoins which could be exchanged. On 1 March 2016, without a prior warning, OneCoin issued an internal notice that the market would be closed for two weeks for maintenance. The notice explained that the maintenance was necessary due to high amount of miners and for "better integration with blockchain". On 15 March 2016, after the two-week maintenance, the market opened again but no visible changes had been done; most of the transactions expired as before and daily limits stayed on.
