Diksia.com - The former head of the OneCoin crypto scam’s legal department was sentenced to four years in prison after admitting to being involved in laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds from the scam.
Quoted from the Mint page, Thursday (04/04/2024) Irina Dilkinska pleaded guilty in November 2023 to fraud and money laundering conspiracy in the OneCoin case.
U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos rejected Dilkinska’s request not to serve her sentence and to return to Bulgaria to care for her two young children.
Dilkinska was sentenced to 10 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.
“(Dilkinska) is a very intelligent woman and should have known better,” Ramos said.
He also ordered Dilkinska to pay $118.4 million or Rp1.8 trillion in compensation for her involvement in the money laundering case.
“He already has everything he needs to know about his involvement in this,” Ramos explained.
“To be honest, I don’t understand what prevented him from leaving the program before it was canceled,” he said.
Prosecutors allege that from 2014 to 2019, Dilkinska helped Mark Scott, OneCoin’s U.S.-based attorney, launder $400 million through a series of fake investment funds in the Cayman Islands.
Scott himself is known as a former partner at Locke Lord LLP who was convicted of money laundering in 2019. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in January 2024.
Dilkinska’s plea for leniency refers to the year she spent in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where she has been held since her extradition from Bulgaria.
His attorney, John P. Buza, argued that his career was derailed and “dragged down” by the fraudsters behind OneCoin.
Dilkinska is the latest person to be sentenced to prison for his involvement in OneCoin, a $4 billion international Ponzi scheme that never had a functioning cryptocurrency.
Instead, it offers members worldwide commissions for recruiting others to buy worthless OneCoin packages.
Ruja Ignatova, the so-called “crypto queen” who allegedly orchestrated the scam, disappeared in 2017 when her organization came under suspicion.
