Episode 972 of Planet Money : The CryptoQueen (2)
BARTLETT: Fans of hers would just write poetry, write music about her. They'd almost - they'd really sort of worship the woman. We heard a lot of songs that had been dedicated to Ruja. That was one of many.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ONE FOR ALL")
O'NEILL: (Singing) ...People all around carrying financial solution.
ARONCZYK: There are all these fans and this whole community online. And Jamie's trying to figure out, well, who are these people in real life? One of the first people he finds is a Scottish woman in her late 40s. Her name is Jen McAdam. Her father had recently passed away, and he'd left her about 10,000 euros.
BARTLETT: So a friend of hers had heard about this new cryptocurrency, OneCoin, and heard about Dr. Ruja and then emailed Jen and said, hey, have you seen this? You know that money that your father left you? This could be a place to invest it.
ARONCZYK: So Jen McAdam goes online. She watches some videos, and she's impressed.
JEN MCADAM: Ruja - she's a doctor, and she has her Ph.D. She worked with McKinsey and Co.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
IGNATOVA: Thank you very much for the invitation to be a speaker at the Economist Forum today and to speak about the future of...
MCADAM: I think when I saw her at the Economist summit, that did it for me. The Economist (laughter) - being a businesswoman previously, I thought, that's amazing. Power of the woman - well done. I felt proud of her.
ARONCZYK: Jen then watches a webinar about OneCoin, and it seems so clear she's getting in early on this amazing investment.
MCADAM: By the time you come off that webinar, you're actually thinking - oh, my goodness - I suppose I could try a thousand-euro package - because it was euros at the time - and then see how it goes. And that's what I did.
ARONCZYK: So here's how this worked. Jen went to the OneCoin website, and she was directed to buy one of these packages that they offer.
BARTLETT: And these packages are priced between, I think, 500 euros up to over a hundred thousand euros for a package. And technically, you are buying education.
ARONCZYK: Actually, just some PDFs with info about cryptocurrencies.
BARTLETT: And with each of those packages - they're differently priced - you receive things called tokens, and those tokens can then be transformed into OneCoin.
ARONCZYK: So Jen gets her own OneCoin account. She buys a thousand-euro package. Every time she logs in, she sees the value of her OneCoin going up and up and up.
MCADAM: When you think you're changing your life financially and your hardships are over - yeah, I remember that as clear as day.
BARTLETT: Were you quite excited? You know, were you excited?
MCADAM: So excited, so excited. So was my friend.
ARONCZYK: She had told all of her friends and family about it, and she would make a commission when her friends invested, too.
MCADAM: We were going to go on holiday. I remember going down to visit her afterward. We thought we would change our lives. We thought that we'd changed all of our family lives.
ARONCZYK: Around the time that he meets Jen McAdam, Jamie gets a tip about OneCoin - that OneCoin has as many as a million investors - a million people like Jen McAdam, people who have OneCoin accounts and have invested some money.
BARTLETT: This is going to blow you away. But we were shown documents - we were leaked documents that estimate that the total amount invested into OneCoin between 2014 and early 2017 is well over 4 billion euros. And it could be as high as 15 billion euros.
ARONCZYK: At least $5 billion and possibly much, much more - and that's just from this one three-year period. And the money is coming in from all over.
BARTLETT: From something like 175 countries in the world.
ARONCZYK: A hundred and seventy-five countries.
BARTLETT: Yeah. I mean, every corner of the globe - people from Palestine; people from the Congo; people from the Vatican; America, of course; China - hundreds of millions of dollars, euros invested from China.
ARONCZYK: So then Jamie's wondering - well, how did this get so big so fast? It's this question that leads him to the mansion of a man who seemingly has everything.
BARTLETT: Can I just quickly ask you about this enormous bear?
IGOR ALBERTS: (Laughter).
ARONCZYK: This is the home of Igor Alberts and his wife Andreea Cimbala. They have a massive garden surrounding their massive, eight-story mansion just outside of Amsterdam.
ALBERTS: We have panthers, rhinos, giraffes.
+ rhino : 코뿔소 [라이노] = rhinoceros
BARTLETT: When you walk into his garden, there's 30 or 40 fiberglass, lifesize animal sculptures from all the different places in the world that he's been to.
ALBERTS: We have gorillas from Uganda.
BARTLETT: You've got pelicans. You've got giraffes.
ALBERTS: This is the house of dreams. And it's - it is a kingdom.
ARONCZYK: Jamie says that Igor Alberts is a big Dutch guy. He's probably in his mid-50s. And he's larger than life in almost every single way. For example, there's the way that he is dressed.
+ larger than life : 허풍[호들갑]을 떠는
BARTLETT: Everything he wore was black and gold Dolce and Gabbana - socks, pants, shoes, sunglasses, waistcoats.
+ waistcoat : 조끼(=vast)
ALBERTS: But when you look at my clothes, they are disciplined.
ANDREEA CIMBALA: Everything - he has socks and pink underwear. And if he dresses in pink, he will dress in pink everything.
ALBERTS: I have it in everything.
ARONCZYK: The Siberian tiger statues, the outfits, the Maserati parked by the gate - if this seems like an ostentatious display of wealth, that is because it is. Igor Alberts and his wife want to look very rich because they're both experts at what's known as multilevel marketing.
+ ostentatious 대단히 비싼[호사스러운], 과시하는
ㄴ showy (흔히 못마땅한) 현란한
+ multilevel marketing : 다단계 판매
BARTLETT: People are probably familiar with this, with certain cosmetic products and vitamin tablets. And there's a lot of this kind of multilevel marketing around.
ARONCZYK: Amway works like this, and so does Herbalife and Avon. People sell the products to their friends and their families. But more importantly, they try to recruit their friends and families to sell the product, too. That's how they make a commission. So you want to look like you're making a lot of money off of selling that product.
BARTLETT: It's a huge industry. There's millions of people around the world doing this.
ARONCZYK: And OneCoin is a great product for multilevel marketers because unlike selling bottles of vitamins, you don't have to store thousands of boxes of the stuff in your garage. A cryptocurrency doesn't need to be boxed or transported.
BARTLETT: But Dr. Ruja Ignatova's genius was to realize that she could take her cryptocurrency and market it through existing multilevel marketing networks.
ARONCZYK: Networks of salespeople who knew how to sell physical products, they could sell a virtual currency even faster.
BARTLETT: And it took off like wildfire. There are people that had worked in multilevel marketing all their lives. They'd never seen anything like it. They'd never seen a product grow like it.
+ take off : 유행하다
ARONCZYK: And one of the best-known sellers is this guy - fiberglass tiger guy. Dr. Ruja recruited Igor Alberts and Andreea not long after she launched OneCoin.
ALBERTS: They invited us to go to Dubai...
CIMBALA: In May 2015.
ALBERTS: ...In May 2015 (laughter). And I saw thousands of people. I saw - when they can all make so much money, it must really be something. Then I saw Dr. Ruja, and she had all princess's dresses. And she definitely knew what she was talking about.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
IGNATOVA: Before you joined OneCoin, 99% of you did not know what cryptocurrency is about.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yes.
IGNATOVA: Now we understand, and we are shaping the future. Everybody needs to know OneCoin's name.
(APPLAUSE)
ALBERTS: What we did then, we gathered the teams together and we started to work like crazy. We made in our first month almost 90,000 euros out of nothing - bang.
ARONCZYK: Eventually, Igor says, he was making a million dollars a month off of OneCoin because he's convincing people to invest, they're convincing other people to invest, they're convincing more people to invest.
TIMOTHY CURRY: They're pretty genius how they put it together, actually.
ARONCZYK: This is Timothy Curry. Jamie called him up because he works in the cryptocurrency industry and he was watching OneCoin. He told Jamie that Igor Alberts wasn't working alone. Igor had assembled a team of the best multilevel marketers in the world to spread the word about OneCoin.
CURRY: Basically, think of it as an all-star soccer team or all-star baseball team or whatever. And they're like, OK, we have a bigger budget than any other baseball team in the United States. Right? And so what we're going to do is we're going to buy the biggest rookies. We're going to take the biggest stars from some of these biggest teams, and that's how we're going to build this team. Right? It's not that much different. You take the best talent; you pay them enough money. And so it's perfect. And if they're getting a paycheck, they're happy to do it.