Irina Dilkinska has been given a sentence of four years for her role in the scandal
US District Judge Edgardo Ramos sentenced the former head of legal and compliance for the multibillion-dollar OneCoin fraud scheme to four years in prison on Wednesday, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office released on April 3. 42-year-old Irina Dilkinska is the latest executive from the disgraced cryptocurrency company to receive time behind bars.
Dilkinska previously admitted her role in helping launder millions of dollars for the firm. She was also sentenced to one month of supervised release and ordered to pay $111 million in restitution.
Judge Ramos previously denied Dilkinska’s request to return home to Bulgaria to care for young children and avoid jail time, saying that she was “a woman of great intelligence and a woman who ought to have known better.” He added that Dilkinska was fully conscious of the consequences of her activities while helping operate a $4-billion Ponzi scheme.
“I honestly do not understand what prevented her from leaving the scheme before the point when it was brought down,” said Ramos.
Dilinska entered a guilty plea to money laundering and wire fraud charges in a Manhattan federal court on November 10. With a five-year maximum sentence for each charge, Dilinska was facing a possible 10-year prison sentence.
The co-founder of the Ponzi scheme, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, was sentenced to 20 years in prison last September on money laundering and fraud charges and was mandated to forfeit $300 million in restitution.
OneCoin co-founder, “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova, has remained at large since October 2017, disappearing after boarding a flight to Greece shortly after federal authorities issued a warrant for her arrest. Some suspect that Ignatova was killed after several OneCoin associates were murdered in Mexico in 2020.
OneCoin was revealed to be defrauding customers in 2015, but it still generated more than $4.3 billion in revenue and nearly $3 billion in profits from 2014 through 2016.
