In 2022, Ruzha Ignatova was included in the FBI's list of ten most wanted persons - where she remains to this day.
In September 2019, a BBC podcast began telling the extraordinary story of Ruzha Ignatova, a Bulgarian woman wanted by the FBI after defrauding investors of $4.5 billion through her fake cryptocurrency before disappearing in a puff of smoke.
Oxford University graduate Ruzha Ignatova was born in Bulgaria and raised in Germany, pursuing a successful career in finance before launching cryptocurrency OneCoin in 2014.
Ignatova convinced millions of people around the world to invest in OneCoin by promising to surpass the huge returns that early Bitcoin investors were seeing.
But in reality, Ignatova - known to many as Dr Ruzha - had created a cleverly disguised investment scam, without the digital record that underpins legitimate cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
In October 2017, when German and US investigators were closing in on Ignatova, she took an early morning Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens, after which she was not seen again.
Richard Reinhardt, who launched the OneCoin investigation for the US Internal Revenue Service alongside the FBI, told the BBC about a key figure that investigators have never publicly named before.
The BBC understands that this is the man given the role of guarding Ignatova - Christophoros Nikos Amanatidis, known as Taki.
"We were told that a major drug pusher was allegedly in charge of her physical security," Reinhardt said in his first interview since retiring in late 2023.
"It came up more than once, it wasn't like it was a one-off. It was a recurring theme," he added.
This matched the information we already had - in 2019 US government lawyers had said that Ignatova's head of security was a major figure in organized crime in Bulgaria, but had not named him.
"We have evidence that a very significant, if not the most prolific drug trafficker of all time in Bulgaria, was closely connected to OneCoin and served as Ruza Ignatova's personal security," said the assistant attorney.
This is the same "head of security" that another US government lawyer said was "involved in the disappearance" of Ignatova in court a day earlier.
According to Reinhardt, Ignatova was a much more sophisticated criminal than most people realize.
"It's like a white-collar criminal combined with a drug dealer or a mobster on steroids," he explained.
This theory appears to be supported by leaked Europol documents which show that before Ignatova disappeared in 2017, Bulgarian police established links between her and Taki.
In the documents, police suspect Taki of using the OneCoin financial network to launder drug-trafficking proceeds.
In his native Bulgaria, Taki has an almost mythical status - something like El Chapo or Pablo Escobar. Suspicions are widespread that he is the head of a Bulgarian organized crime group and a prolific drug smuggler.
He and his associates were investigated for armed robbery, drug smuggling and murder, but were never charged with anything.
"When we talk about Taki, he is the head of the mafia in Bulgaria. He is extremely powerful," said former Bulgarian deputy minister Ivan Hristanov, who in 2022 investigated allegations that Taki ran a criminal network with the help of corrupt officials - and believes that this is so.
"That's how the ghost is. You'll never see him. You'll only hear about him. He talks to you through other people. If you don't listen to him, you just disappear from the earth. The only person who can protect her from all these investigations, including foreign ones agencies - that's Taki," he added.
Taki is now believed to be living in Dubai, where Ignatova has bought a luxury penthouse and where tens of millions of dollars from the OneCoin scam have flowed into her bank accounts.
While it is unknown how Taki and Ignatova met and whether he was involved with OneCoin from the beginning, multiple sources claim that they had a close personal relationship and that he was her daughter's godfather.
One of the Bulgarian sources said she may have been paying Taki up to €100,000 a month for protection.
There appear to be other financial ties between her and Taki.
The Europol documents mention a complex deal for the sale of a plot of land on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, linking one of Ignatova's companies to Taki's wife.
The secret police documents were given to the BBC by Frank Schneider, a former spy and adviser to Ignatova.
He said his old boss worked with "crooks" and "gangsters", adding:
"I'm not going to tell you who because I have a family... This is really serious organized crime."
But in the end, Ruzha Ignatova's defender may have turned into an aggressor.
In 2022, Bulgarian investigative journalist Dimitar Stoyanov was handed a police report that was found in the home of a murdered Bulgarian policeman.
In the document, a police informant details how he overheard Taki's brother-in-law say in a drunken state that Ignatova was killed on Taki's orders in late 2018 and her body dismembered and dumped from a yacht in the Ionian Sea.
Stoyanov emphasized that this story is "very, very possible".
The authenticity of the police document has been confirmed by the Bulgarian authorities, and many of Taki's criminal associates consider the theory that he killed her to be true, Stoyanov added.
The associates reasoned that the wanted Ignatova had become a liability for Taki, who wanted to remove his ties to the OneCoin scam.
Among these partners is Krasimir Kamenov, known as Kuro, who is wanted by Interpol on charges of murder.
Kuro told Dimitar Stoyanov that he heard Taki discussing his criminal business in front of Ignatova. When he asked Taki if it was safe to talk about it openly, Taki replied, "Don't worry, she's practically dead."
Curro also claimed to have spoken with the CIA about Taki, including the allegation that Taki ordered Ignatova's murder.
In May 2023, Curro was murdered at his home in Cape Town along with his wife and two other people who worked for him. South African police are still looking for the killers, but Bulgarian former deputy minister Hristanov believes Kuro's murder is linked to Taki.
"Certain people had to be removed because they knew too much about Taki. It was a sort of public execution that was more like a warning: 'Be careful who you deal with,'" he said.
After publishing the allegations about the Ignatova murder, journalist Dimitar Stoyanov and his colleagues faced death threats, which forced him to temporarily leave Bulgaria for the fourth time in his career.
Stoyanov claims that property records show that after Ruza Ignatova's disappearance, a number of her properties in Bulgaria are now being used by people connected to Taki.
Taki was never arrested in connection with the allegations that he ordered Ignatova's murder. Her body has never been found, and investigators say they don't have enough evidence to charge him.
But former IRS investigator Richard Reinhardt believes Ignatova is likely dead. Although he hasn't seen any evidence linking her death to Taki, he says it fits the way drug cartels operate.
"There is no honor among thieves. Knowing how brutal the cartels are, if Taki thought she was a threat to him he probably would have eliminated her rather than risk getting caught," he said. | BGNES
