YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamie Bartlett

lines on the record: 45
first: 2022-07-06
most recent: 2022-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Was happening because it is that like it is quite a fast paced drama. You know, what actually happens and how quickly it grows and how quickly it collapses. It just felt like it needed to be written as one of these kind of page turning crime true crime thrillers rather than about us making the podcast. And I went for a coffee with Georgia in October 2018 and we talked about this, that and the other. So I tried to make it different and I was very conscious that there's a lot of people out there that really like the podcast and wanted you would have wanted to go in a bit more detail. And the thing about podcast is you can just say a question, you leave a question hanging unanswered, whack a bit of music on there. We had this really cool Bulgarian music. And everyone cares, but with a book, you've got to be really comprehensive. You've got to try and dig into every tiny little.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got quite a lot of credit at the BBC for helping to expose it. But the reality was there's a lot of other people that had worked before us. Like I said, these armchair detectives and citizen journalists who've been trying to expose it for a very long time. And I didn't want the book to be like, look what we did at the BBC. We found this and we discovered that. Because I felt like that would also take quite a lot away from all the much more interesting story of ordinary people trying to bring this thing down. So I don't even appear in the book until like the last 20 pages. I'm hardly in it at all. I thought what this story deserved was the kind of beginning to the end, like just looking down at what was going on. The story told sort of objectively in the third person. So I could see what...”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because I wanted it to be different, partly because I'd been spending so long on this story. I'd been spending my whole life with one coin. And I needed it to be different. And I also felt like...”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“30 tip offs, and hopefully one coin is still being promoted out there, you know. And hopefully the fact that she's appearing now on the Europol's most wanted list, any possible investor, you send them that email and say really, there she is on Europol's most wanting. Are you really sure you want to invest in this currency? Look, it won't stop everyone, but it might just, again, slow down slightly the number of people joining.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, sorry, Europol. I do think it's a bit of a game changer for a couple of reasons. Now she's got she's on that Interpol red notice list, so 193 countries or whatever it is sort of under some obligation to arrest her if they see her. And she's on Europol's most wanted list and there's now a kind of German arrest warrant out for her. And they've been putting up wanted posters all over Germany. So her movement at the very least will be more constrained than ever. She will know now there's people really seriously looking for her. So if nothing else, it makes her life a lot more difficult. The German authorities have said they've received thirty tip-offs of varying quality, they say.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that she would still be living the lifestyle that she had been accustomed to This was the number one lesson that the private investigator we had working with us said If she likes fancy food, top end restaurants, total luxury, every time I've been looking for someone in my career, they're still living the same way. And she was actually quite family orientated in many ways as well. So, I don't think she's that far away. I don't think she's still with us. We've had too many quite credible sightings to make it seem she's just dead somewhere. I'm not going to give it all away completely, but I think she might have even logged in and she's watching this from someone.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She is obviously traveling under fake documents with a new face and a fake name and a large amount of money, of course, but you've got to remember it isn't as difficult to disappear as you might think. Not if you've got a lot of money, you've got all the right documentation and you're extremely careful and you plan for it. If you look at Europol's list of most wanted people, there are people that have been on the run for years and years and years they've been on that list. People have been looking for them and they've never been found. Now there is a possibility. It's difficult with this because I'm always obviously asked that and you've got to read the book really to see exactly how I've come to the conclusions I've reached. It's a guess. It's my best guess.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then she moved around. She went from place to place. And I got a few, we've worked out, and it's in the book, where I think based on my best guess and the evidence we've seen, where I think she moved around to. So I think she is still out there. I think I got an idea about where, at least until recently, she may have been.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Next podcast episode something like two to three months, something like that, some point in the late summer, I think. Why did she disappear? She disappeared, I believe, because she learned that she was about to be arrested. Wasn't planning to disappear forever. She was planning to come back. German authorities who'd been investigating OneCin for a very long time for nearly two years before she disappeared raided her office in Sofia and I think this is my theory that she realized that she wasn't going to be coming back because this was serious.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I thought I might have a question. I was surprised. I was thinking it's 10 minutes to go, and no one said, Where do you think she?”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know there are efforts underway. Jen McAdam, who is in the podcast, the BBC podcast, is also working on efforts to sort of get victims together so they can try to get a fund going that anything's frozen could then be redistributed. But it's hard and it's a very slow process.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$385 million, I think it was, something like between $380 and $400 million. But there were other ways the money was spent as well. So that sort of worked surprisingly well. A lot of money went through that and out the other end, and she was able to spend it and buy assets. Now, a lot of those assets are frozen, but a lot of money is still unaccounted for. Hundreds of millions is unaccounted for and dotted around in banks all over the world. We're still trying to figure out where it all is. And the difficulty for people like Layla is it takes a very long time to find it, to freeze it, to then work out how you begin to return it to victims. Is it based on the amount you invested? You've got a million people around the world that maybe are asking for money. Who gets what when? Which country's in charge of it? There's so many difficult questions.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge amounts of money is a big problem for people when you're pouring in millions and millions of euros from all over the world. Banks want to know what on earth you're doing with it. And the key is often you need to turn it into sort of usable assets that are legitimate. You do not want your accounts frozen. Roug often face a problem with her accounts being frozen by banks, including in Dubai and elsewhere. So her corporate lawyer who is an investment fund manager from the US, he set up a series of 100 million dollar investment funds called the Fanero Funds that Rougia was taking the money from the investors and then putting it into these very, very sort of legitimate looking investment funds where it was used to buy property and shares in companies.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I were to design another one coin type Ponzi scam now, it would probably involve an NFT, hyped up, exciting, massive valuation, people don't understand the tech, but they see credible people talking about it as the future. And you sell it through multi-level marketing again. And people would buy it. People would invest. I think NFTs themselves are a fascinating idea. The idea digital scarcity as a concept has fascinating uses. Invariably, though, the latest exciting tech gets picked up. And there are already, and if plenty of NFT scams out there.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, all it is is about slowing them down a bit. I don't think we're going to stop them. And I don't think any amount of anything I've said will override this fear of missing out when you see Bitcoin go up and you want a piece of the action. It's just about doing things that might slow its growth a little bit, maybe reduce by 30% the number of people that invest. But if you could reduce by 30% one million people that are investing in this, you're saving a fortune. So that's the best I hope for.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sold to retail investors never because it doesn't work so regulators need to do something. I also think the problem is that the responsibility at the moment seems to be geared up towards the money laundering, the money launderers, the heads of the company, the people that were committing the wire fraud. It's never the promoters. The promoters are sort of forgotten about because they're sometimes because they bought and sold, so it's hard. But maybe there's a case that if you can prove that promoters were knowingly misselling products, you need to, it would be good to be able to sort of secure a couple of convictions on those grounds, which might encourage other people to think twice before promoting. Because at the moment it feels like the promoters are often the ones that there's a frustration that promoters never seem to have any consequences whatsoever.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already seeing these, there's already sort of clones and almost identical type companies popping up all over the world, and they'll be based in other jurisdictions, but they'll be selling directly to UK consumers. So it's really, really difficult when you're talking about these sort of global scams that can target people in every country. I do think the regulators need to be more proactive. They need to try to, do you remember when legal Heis died becoming a big thing? And what would happen is one legal high drug would be banned and one week later, one chemical compound would be changed, and that wouldn't be banned. And they'd start selling that for a week. And then in the end, they kind of put a more moratorium on a class of class of drugs. I think anything where you're sort of combining cryptocurrency with multi-level marketing, for example, you could almost put a moratorium on that and say none of those things should be.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that suddenly she's in possession of hundreds of millions of dollars, and at that point other networks kind of basically join because they can see all of this money and she can't really operate without the support of wider groups of people.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my goodness, me. It's a really difficult question because so far no one from organized crime groups has come forward and given me an on-the-record interview where they admit their connections. But there is quite a lot of pretty good evidence that suggests that she was pretty well connected within Bulgaria and within some of those circles. If I can just put it that way. It's hard to stand these things up, as we say journalistically. My best bet though is that it's actually started off that she was acting alone. Her and Sebastian Greenwood and another man called Yuhar Puriala, another top promoter, got together and designed this, thought this is going to be a really clever little thing. It probably won't get that big, but we'll make a decent amount of money. It'll collapse, but we'll blame, you know, we tried our best. It's not our fault. Crypto is speculative. It grew so...”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always blamed the leaders one coin. You'd phone one coin HQ and they'd say, Oh, it's the leader's fault above you. Go and speak to them.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What one coin was very good at doing, I think, was because it operated in so many different jurisdictions, there was no one single authority that could definitively say it was a scam, this is illegal. Because every jurisdiction And I think what it sometimes says is that there's a reason that London became like a second home to her. London is sort of set up in some cases for the legal grey area and lots of very, very specialised technical, brilliant minds are helping companies work in that legal grey area. And it's a shame because I think a lot of other countries look to London and especially places like the Financial Conduct Authority, there need to be leaders as a financial hub leaders in making this kind of investment safer. And I think we failed really on that score.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has a say over what is deemed valuable or worthless. Join us to discuss these questions and more in our next event, Reimagining Worth, with guests including longtime FT columnist and now charity founder, Lucy Kellaway, Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of Whale, a book that examines the truth of green capitalism and the banker, co-creator and host of the award-winning Money Maze podcast, Simon Brewer. The event will be moderated by award-winning journalist and broadcaster John Sopal. Register to join us live online on Tuesday 5th of July from 6.30pm. Just go to ye.com slash futureverse. That's why hyphentree dot com slash futureverse.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello from Intelligence Squared. We'd like to invite you to explore the next live streamed event in the future verse, our series produced in partnership with YTree. In this event and in the two podcasts that will follow it, we'll be examining a huge cultural shift that we're calling the value revolution. Ever since another transformational period, the Industrial Revolution, there has been a global consensus about what constitutes value And services can be exchanged for money, which in turn pays for other products and services, but we are now in an era of disruption. Technology, disease and climate change are some of the key factors that have recently caused us to pause and re-examine our lives. We have entered the Value Revolution. How do we define value now, and how has this changed over time?”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This book, a lot of it, is actually about the ordinary people that got together to try and bring this down and were posting about it saying this is a gigantic Ponzi scam before I'd even heard of it. They didn't have top lawyers. They didn't have all the stuff that the BBC has, but still they would write about it. And that's a real bravery because, you know, you're kind of out there on your own. And I know some of the critics were getting letters for lawyers threatening them. And that is, we're not threatening them. They're saying you need to do this or do that. And it's terrifying. It's terrifying when you get those letters. So it's a wider problem, I think, in journalism at the moment. It goes beyond the scope of this book. But can you see? I mean, look, I'm just absolutely, you see the bags under those eyes. That is from writing this book.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worried all the time. Oh my goodness, me. What if I'm going to get this happen to me or that happened to me? And I get this thing wrong and these people are going to write this letter to me. And it just makes you nervous. It makes you feel as a journalist. You're paranoid and your tendency is often to self-censor because you don't want to get dragged into these things. You're not wealthy individuals as a journalist. You can't afford to do all of this. And I think a lot of places have, they understand that. Companies like OneCoin, I think understood that. And they would, it's a way to put it is that OneCoin would sometimes use law firms to do that. So in a way, it was easier for me. I got to give more credit to the people that were trying to blow the whistle on one coin in 2015, 16, 17, 18 before the podcast.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, honestly, it's been the hardest thing I've ever worked on by a mile. When we first did the podcast, the main people we were going to all the time was Onecoin. We had to go to One Coin. It was still a company and sort of put allegations to them, which their response, they responded and we added, we put the responses in because that's partly it's legal, but it's also BBC editorial policy about fairness and balance and giving the rights of people to also reply. That was sort of simple in a sense. As the story expands more and more different people come into it and your job as a journalist is to try to understand the whole picture and how it works. And it does really does make it difficult. And people who read the book will see bracketed such and such denies such and such. Or you'll see it throughout, dotted throughout. And it's an important part of doing this job. But I'll tell you what, it does make you as a journalist really quite paranoid. I've been walking around for the last few months really sort of.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, think that Rouge benefited from the fact that the crypto world generally was so dominated by men that she turned up as a woman in this, a lot of people invested because they saw a woman at the top and they were excited by the fact it seemed like quite empowering to have a female crypto leader at last maybe had the crypto market been a little bit more diverse. She wouldn't have stood out and that's a sort of an aside if you like but you've got to see one coin in the wider context of how we see other people making money and it made one coin look normal.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saw happening all around them. And I think the reality is as well if you're a multimillionaire and you're Warren Buffett, 5 or 10% return on your investment, yeah, that's pretty good. I get that that's not bad. What's that going to do if you're earning a few hundred pounds a month? What's 10% going to help you? How's it going to help your life? It's not. It's not going to get you where you want to go. So you combine those two things together and there you are. And then you layer a technology on it. And we do live in a world where no one understood the tech, but everywhere we look, technology seems to do magical things. It seems to transform the world. It helps me get to the shops every day. I can communicate. It's a magical, magical thing. So someone turns up with a new technology saying, this is going to transform the world. 50 years ago, you'd have said they were a mad person. Now you think, great, another pioneer, another visionary.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think it does tap into a wider, it's almost like investment culture. It's almost as if you don't make money life-changing money by doing your sort of diligent research on a company's books, you know, carefully putting a bit here, a bit here and diversifying your assets and all the rest of it. You make big money if you're in quick. If you get in early, if you're the first one, if you get a tip off, that seems to be technology startup venture capital culture, but also cryptocurrency culture. And that has been true for a lot of these projects. And it seemed reasonable when Rouges stands up there and says people are going to turn 5,000 euros into 100,000 euros in a matter of months. It seemed reasonable because that is what people...”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The difference between the top and the bottom, it really is shaped like a pyramid because you go to the very top, the highest sort of level of the one coin pyramid were black diamonds who were really the sort of the people that had downlines of hundreds and hundreds of people that were selling. They were earning, you know, you could be earning a million euros a month driving around, yeah, driving around in Bentleys and Lamborghinis. And that it was always, you always saw that and thought that is what I could get to. I could be up there if I work hard enough.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've worked out that the number of people that actually made money from this was very, very small. You had to be right at the top of the pyramid to have made a few thousand people. Everyone else, let's say between 800,000 and a million people, were ordinary retail investors, normal people who'd got 5,000 euros, 10,000 euros scraped together and couldn't get it back. And, you know, that can be, that's life-changing.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't know what happened to them, but the speculation is they'd ripped people off. People wanted their money back. Listen, you told me to invest. Where's my money? And they haven't got the money. And this chain of like responsibility where it is you are both an investor but also a promoter. What keeps it really stuck, and people can't leave easily because of that responsibility that they have. So the human cost, I mean, you're talking about...”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would require you admitting you had scammed your own nearest and dearest. It's more than just the money, but the money does matter too. I've spoken to people whose lives are just devastated. They've got nothing left. They've lost all of their life savings. They put everything into this. And their families too. And this is in every country in the world. There was a story recently. It can get really, really dark and serious. Ponzi and Pyramid schemes that fail are known to be accompanied by people killing themselves because of the shame. There was even a story recently. It's not just about the people that invested. A story recently of, over a year ago now, of two Mexican Onecoin investors. Who are promoting it to people who turned up dead somewhere”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's the shame as much as the money. This is what I think makes Ponzi and Pyramid schemes, especially pyramid schemes with this recruitment technique, so damaging, more so than a normal investment scam. You might put your money into something you've seen online. The money doesn't come back. You might get your bank details stolen and your fraud, you're defrauded of money. But this is different. This is your actively involved in recruiting the people you care most about. And so there's a shame. And I think that is why people, it would take them, they'd be a lot quicker to invest than they would be to let it go. Some people would see the warning signs and they would not want to admit to themselves what had happened. They doubt they'd fear somewhere deep down that this wasn't right. But it was easier to carry on because that”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technology she promised she had the Bitcoin killer, the improvement to Bitcoin wasn't real. And the payment promise of going on to an exchange and turning it into euros never happened. And so investors even now are left with, in some cases, what they believe is millions of euros worth of one coin sitting on an account somewhere, but they can't do anything with. It's valueless. So it's the US authorities have described it as an old-fashioned Ponzi pyramid scheme, but with a modern digital twist.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Dr. Roosia and the other promoters were promising that very soon you will be able to go onto a public exchange site and turn those coins you've bought into real money, into euros or dollars or pounds or whatever. And people were waiting for that to happen. Now, some people did make some money from the commissions. Some people even turned a small proportion of the coins into euros and actually cashed them out. I estimate that roughly 30% of all the money that was pulled in was paid out in one way or another. But then Dr. Roosia in October 2017 vanishes into thin air after taking a Ryanair flight from Sofia Bulgaria to Athens, Greece. And we realize that the whole thing is just a sophisticated but old-fashioned Ponzi pyramid scheme. The coin value that she claimed, the price of this coin was just made up by her. The powerful”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In its essential state, it was a combination of three scams rolled into one. It was a multi-level marketing product sold in the way I've just described. So you sell to your friends who'd sell to their friends who'd sell to their friends. But instead of selling vitamin tablets and shampoos and coffee, you were selling the next Bitcoin. You were selling this amazing new cryptocurrency out of Sofia, Bulgaria, run by this genius businesswoman with a PhD in law called Dr. Ruja Ignatava. So this thing is growing very, very quickly. You can make money on your commissions by selling it to other people, or you can just sit still and let the coins you bought just go up in value and go up in value. They did because investors would be going and checking the price of their coins every week and they'd see it would go up to $1, $8, $12, $30.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having a loss aversion. We're more worried about losing something we have than gaining something we haven't got. It almost flipped here because the loss in the minds of the one coin investors was the loss of changing your life, of buying a new car, buying a new house, going on a nice holiday. And nobody was really interested in 10%, 20% returns a year. They wanted 100x. They wanted to change their lives. They wanted this amazing stuff. And the fear that you could miss that and the urgency, the clever marketing that you've got to buy right now before the coins are going to double or they'll go up in value. It'll be too late. You need to hit this target. Those things all combine to make it almost like a sort of perfect scam.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you see, can I just add because there's something really important, and it's weird that it's taken me to write a whole book to come up with a very simple answer to that question, Cole. How could so many people want to put so much money in so quick when they didn't really understand it? And you probably sat around the table, Layla, because I know a lot of people that did. Friends and family would say to them, oh, listen, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. You've got to be careful. The problem is Bitcoin had gone up so far, so quickly that a lot of people were so fearful, the fear of missing out on the next Bitcoin. I think it sort of overrode all the rational considerations that people might have had that might have slowed them down. We always talk about humans as being”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To India, to Uganda in three days. It spread. So Because it was sold through multi level marketing, it was based on the trust that you had in the person that sold it to you. So because like Leila's experience, it was a friend, it was a family member who thought they'd got in on the big thing and wanted to share with you their amazing new opportunity. You didn't know the tech, you didn't understand Bitcoin very well, but you trusted your friend. You trusted your friend wouldn't rip you off.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The front, the face of this company, he was behind the scenes working on the sales techniques and the strategies. And his world was not cryptocurrency or finance. It was multi-level marketing. And multi-level marketing people have probably heard of Amway, Tupperware, Avon, Herberlife. And it's a technique of selling where you might bring your friends around and sell them some vitamins and get a small commission and then you recruit them to bring their friends and family in and you get a small commission of what they sell. And this grows into a giant pyramid. That's why it can grow so quickly and it can cross continents in a day because suddenly you're selling to your friends and family over the other side of the world via a seminar. People have often wondered how did it reach 175 countries so fast? Because it was going from Sophia to London to Pakistan.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two days. I didn't think I realized it was quite that quick, Layla, but your story isn't unfamiliar. That can be the speed and it's often two days and then two days later you've got your friends and family putting their money in. And two days later they've got their friends and family putting their money in. And there's a couple of reasons for, well, there's lots of reasons for this, but there's a couple that really stand out. In the podcast, we never really talked about Rougia's co-founder. We focused really on her because she's the missing one. But there's another person that's absolutely key to this story, and his name is Sebastian Greenwood. He's currently sitting in a prison cell awaiting a trial in New York. He was the multi-level marketing side of the company. If Rougia was the financial genius who kind of understood the tech and put herself forward as”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In London, you know, two years later or whatever, the thing just spreads rapidly, 175 countries, possibly as many as a million people invested. And the speed is remarkable.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In value and Rugia turns up and says Bitcoin's great, it's fascinating, but one coin's better and she was really clever with this. She says Bitcoin is technical, it's for geeks, it's for nerds, it's decentralized, people use it to buy drugs off the dark net. It's the revolution we've been waiting for, but it's not quite right. And I've got a better one. It's for you ordinary people. And I think during the podcast, when we did the podcast, I didn't realize maybe how powerful that sort of twisting of you're taking Bitcoin's problems and claiming you'd fix them. So this was for you, the ordinary person who'd missed out, but this was now your chance. Forget the techies in the nerds. That was the thing that helped it fly. But between that moment in August 2014, all the way up to when Leila turns up at a Wembley, sorry, at a seminar.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so glad Layla's here as well to give us that perspective on it all. I think when Layla, when you went to your first Onecoin event there, probably it was really at the height of the Onecoin bubble, if you like. 2016 at Wembley was when Rougia in June of 2016 was in front of 3,000 adoring fans. By that point, already something like two to three billion euros had been invested into Onecoin. But actually, it had taken a couple of years to get to that point. The whole thing started in August 2014. Bitcoin was sort of bubbling along. I don't know, $300, $400. It had already had a couple of surges. It was slowly making its way into the, I guess that probably at that point, the technology mainstream rather than the mainstream mainstream as an interesting, strange currency that had been going up rapidly.”
2022-07-06 · Intelligence Squared · The Hunt for the Missing Cryptoqueen, with Jamie Bartlett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT