Wherever former Luxembourg spy Frank Schneider is hiding from justice today, he’s finding out that his alleged accomplices in a $4 billion (€3.7 billion) global cryptocurrency scam will spend years in US prisons.
A former high-profile Miami corporate lawyer, who turned his talents to designing a money-laundering plan that could pass the scrutiny of anti-money laundering staff at banks around the world, is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday in the OneCoin scheme.
Mark S. Scott was convicted four years ago and should spend at least 17 years in prison, prosecutors said in a memo filed on Friday. Scott’s lawyers argued he should receive five years behind bars.
Last September, OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years in prison. His co-founder, Ruja Ignatova, has been on the run for years and is on the US FBI’s ten most-wanted list of criminals.
Schneider is not that highly sought-after despite facing a possible 40 years in prison if he is caught and convicted at a trial. He was facing extradition from France to the United States on charges of fraud and money laundering when he fled from house arrest in June.
Schneider’s work for OneCoin involved tracking the progress of law enforcement investigations into the fraud, US officials alleged in court documents in 2022.
Schneider was arrested at gunpoint and jailed by French police in April 2021 just across the Luxembourg border at the request of the US. He was later released but was placed under house arrest and ordered to wear an electronic ankle bracelet that could track his location.
A French court in 2022 approved Schneider’s extradition to the US to face trial.
Ignatova and others allegedly organised one of the world’s biggest fraud schemes beginning in approximately 2014 by marketing a claimed cryptocurrency through her company, OneCoin. It turned out to be a pyramid scheme that cheated its investors.
Schneider admitted that he and his Luxembourg company worked for Ignatova and said in 2022 that if OneCoin was a scam that he should be held responsible. Schneider also confirmed that Sandstone, the company he founded after leaving Luxembourg’s intelligence agency Srel in 2008 after eight years of service, worked for the cryptocurrency company.
A regional court in Germany earlier this month sentenced a North Rhine-Westphalia woman to four years in prison, her partner to five years and a Munich lawyer to 33 months after prosecutors accused them of aiding and abetting fraud in the OneCoin scheme, illegal payment services and money laundering, the Luxemburger Wort reported. The court in Münster also ordered the confiscation of €1.2 million euros from the woman, €41 million from a company the couple ran together and €627,000 from the convicted lawyer, the German business newspaper Capital reported.
(This story was updated at 11.:34 on 23 January to include sentencing details for German collaborators in the OneCoin case.)
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