Ponsy and pyramid schemes that fail are known to be accompanied by people killing themselves. Jenny, give us a sense of the human costs. Ikewhat happened to people that suddenly realized that they'd lostnd some catches everything. The difference between top and bottom is shaped like a pyramid - it really is life or death.
Dr Ruja Ignatova, an Oxford-educated, self-styled cryptocurrency guru, promised her followers a financial revolution through her project: OneCoin. Then, in October 2017, she disappeared. But not before she had duped investors around the world, some of whom are the poorest people in society, into buying up more than $4 billion-worth of OneCoin. Ignatova has been in hiding ever since and was recently added to Europol's most wanted list. Jamie Bartlett is an expert on the politics of the internet and has put the story into a podcast series and now a new book, too: The Missing Cryptoqueen. To talk about it all, he joins our host Carl Miller, Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, and Layla Begum, a business development executive who was one of the many victims of the OneCoin scandal.
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