The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a compensation program for victims of the $4 billion OneCoin crypto fraud, using assets forfeited by the OneCoin project’s architects.

 

According to a Monday press release, the remission program launched by the U.S. Department of Justice is open to all victims who purchased the fraudulent OneCoin cryptocurrency between 2014 and 2019, with the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering, Narcotics and Forfeiture Section handling the compensation process.

 

Victims who suffered losses from investing in the fraudulent OneCoin project have been urged to obtain a petition form online at www.onecoinremission.com. Victims may also call, email, or write to the Remission Administrator to request that a petition form be sent to them, and they must do so before the June 30 deadline.

 

The planned compensation has drawn strong positive comments from the public, with many applauding the Department of Justice for taking this step. Reacting to this news, Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said his office will continue working to seize criminal proceeds and prioritize returning money to victims.

 

“With the unwavering support from the Department of Justice, the FBI maintains its commitment to returning these stolen funds to their rightful owners,” said James C. Barnacle Jr, the FBI assistant director in charge of the case.

 

“Our office will continue its investigative pursuit of these criminal fraudsters, especially in locating Ruja Ignatova, an FBI Top Ten Fugitive, alongside our partners at the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and the Southern District of New York,” Barnacle added. He also urged the public to provide any information that could lead to the arrest of Ruja Ignatova, OneCoin’s alleged mastermind.

 

Inside the OneCoin Crypto Fraud

OneCoin was a fraudulent cryptocurrency project founded in 2014 by Ruja Ignatova, often referred to as the Cryptoqueen, alongside Karl Sebastian Greenwood. It was often referred to as the “Bitcoin killer” and was launched and marketed as a simpler, safer, and more accessible alternative to Bitcoin.

 

Although marketed as a cryptocurrency project, it was far from a legitimate cryptocurrency and was run like a classic Ponzi or pyramid scheme.

 

Despite the team falsely claiming that it had its own private blockchain and mining facilities in Bulgaria and Hong Kong, OneCoin fell short of being a cryptocurrency, with no decentralized public ledger and it was not tradeable on cryptocurrency exchanges.

 

Investors also had to buy expensive educational packages priced anywhere between €100 and over €100,000, with some spending up to €225,000 on these packages that were largely plagiarized from Wikipedia and other online content. The more investors spent on these packages, the more OneCoins they purchased, and the more they recruited new members, the higher their commissions.

 

This continued until the OneCoin marketplace temporarily shut down in early 2016 under the guise of carrying out upgrades and maintenance. The so called upgrade lasted several months, during which Ignatova, the project’s founder, disappeared in 2017.

 

What followed was a series of raids and arrests targeting the project’s executives, including Sebastian Greenwood, OneCoin’s co founder, Irina Dilkinska, an executive, and Konstantin Ignatov, Ruja’s brother, as well as the seizure of several of the project’s assets.

 

Image credit: fbi.gov

 

Ruja Ignatova remains a fugitive and is still on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, with a $5 million reward offered for information leading to her arrest. Europol is also searching for her.

 

 

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have filed parallel federal lawsuits against the states of Illinois, Connecticut, and Arizona, as well as their gaming regulators, over the federal government’s right to regulate prediction markets.

 

The filings, which were made on Thursday, aim to prevent these states from restricting prediction market companies and enforcing state-level rules on them. The CFTC claims that it possesses exclusive regulatory authority over prediction markets and says it will defend participants from what it describes as overzealous state regulators.

 

With this move, the CFTC seeks to halt strict regulatory actions taken by these states’ authorities, including several cease-and-desist letters issued to prediction market companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket.

 

What These States Did

Earlier this year, the Arizona Attorney General filed criminal charges against KalshiEx LLC and Kalshi Trading LLC, accusing them of operating an illegal gambling business without a state license and violating state election wagering laws.

 

In December 2025, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection (DCP) issued cease-and-desist orders to multiple prediction market platforms, including Kalshi, Crypto.com, and Robinhood, accusing them of offering illegal sports event contracts and operating unlicensed online gambling operations within the state.

 

In April 2025, the Illinois Gaming Board (IGB) issued cease-and-desist letters to Kalshi, Polymarket, and Crypto.com, asserting that the sports event contracts offered by these platforms constituted illegal wagering under Illinois gambling law.

 

In the court filing against Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Attorney General Kwame Raoul, and the Illinois Gaming Board, the U.S. commodities regulator argues that event contracts traded on approved exchanges qualify as “swaps” under federal law, not gambling. The regulator also contends that Congress granted it exclusive jurisdiction and that Illinois’s insistence on licensing requirements amounts to an attempt to block federally regulated exchanges from operating.

 

Image credit: courtlistener

 

CFTC Acting Chair Michael Selig reiterated in a post on X that the CFTC has exclusive authority to regulate prediction market activity in the United States, and confirmed that the lawsuit was jointly filed by his agency and the U.S. Department of Justice.

 

 

Crackdown on Prediction Market Intensifies

Prediction market companies have faced intense crackdowns and regulatory restrictions in the U.S. in recent times. There are currently over 20 nationwide lawsuits filed against prediction market companies by regulators from several states, including New York, Washington, Nevada, and Massachusetts.

 

Outside the U.S., there have also been several strict regulatory actions by authorities in multiple countries, with many regulators accusing prediction market companies, especially Polymarket and Kalshi, of operating unregistered gambling activities and offering illegal sports event contracts in their jurisdictions.