According to CryptoPotato, the Southern District of New York announced that Irina Dilkinska was sentenced to four years in prison by U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos for her involvement in OneCoin's extensive fraud scheme. Dilkinska was a former legal and compliance officer of OneCoin and was extradited to the United States from Bulgaria in March 2023. According to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Dilkinska participated in its daily operations and laundered money for OneCoin instead of ensuring compliance with the law. This included planning to transfer $110 million in fraudulently obtained OneCoin proceeds to entities in the Cayman Islands.
Dilkinska pleaded guilty last November to charges of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy related to her position at OneCoin. In addition to her prison sentence, Dilkinska, a 42-year-old Bulgarian citizen, was sentenced to one month of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $111.44 million.
OneCoin was founded in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2014 and used a global multi-level marketing (“MLM”) strategy to promote and trade a fraudulent cryptocurrency of the same name. As a result of misleading information about OneCoin, investors invested more than $4 billion into this fraudulent cryptocurrency.