NEW YORK — A co-founder of the fraudulent cryptocurrency OneCoin, a pyramid scheme that conned billions of dollars from investors worldwide, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering charges, U.S. prosecutors said Friday.
Touted as a “Bitcoin killer,” prosecutors said the purported cryptocurrency co-founded by Ruja Ignatova and Karl Sebastian Greenwood in 2014 in Bulgaria was actually worthless. Though marketed as a cryptocurrency, it was never mined using computers and there was no public and verifiable blockchain. The value of OneCoin was not set by supply and demand, but by its operators, they said.
Greenwood, 45, was arrested at his island residence in Thailand in 2018 and extradited to the United States. He pleaded guilty Friday in federal court in Manhattan.
Greenwood, a citizen of Sweden and the United Kingdom, has been detained since his arrest.
U.S. Attorney Damian…
