Mark Scott, OneCoin Fraud, New York 2023

Former law firm partner Mark Scott has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for laundering approximately $400 million of proceeds from the massive international fraud scheme known as ‘OneCoin.’

Mark Scott, 55, of Coral Gables, Florida, was convicted on all counts at trial on November 21, 2019. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said, ‘Mark Scott, previously convicted at trial of laundering over $400 million of OneCoin proceeds for ‘Crypto Queen,’ Ruja Ignatova, used his law license as a means to participate in a massive money laundering scheme for a cryptocurrency that had no value since its inception.’

According to the Indictment, documents filed in the case, and evidence introduced at trial, OneCoin, which began operations in 2014 and was based in Sofia, Bulgaria, marketed and sold a fraudulent cryptocurrency by the same name through a global multi-level-marketing (‘MLM’) network. The OneCoin scheme was one of the largest fraud schemes ever perpetrated, taking in more than $4 billion from at least 3.5 million victims between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the fourth quarter of 2016 alone.

OneCoin marketed its fake cryptocurrency through a global MLM network of OneCoin members. Unlike legitimate cryptocurrencies, OneCoin had no actual value and was conceived of as a fraud from day one. The misrepresentations made to OneCoin investors were legion, and the cryptocurrency was worthless.

Mark Scott, who was employed between June 2015 and September 2016 as an equity partner at Locke Lord LLP, a prominent international law firm, was first introduced to OneCoin’s co-founder, Ruja Ignatova, in September 2015. Beginning in early 2016, Scott formed a series of fake private equity investment funds in the British Virgin Islands known as the ‘Fenero Funds.’

As part of the scheme, Scott and his co-conspirators lied to banks and other financial institutions all over the world, including to banks in the U.S., to cause those institutions to make transfers of OneCoin proceeds and evade anti-money laundering procedures. Scott was paid more than $50 million for his money laundering services and used that money to purchase, among other things, a collection of luxury watches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a Ferrari and several Porsches, a 57-foot Sunseeker yacht, and three multimillion-dollar seaside homes in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

In addition to the prison term, Scott was sentenced to three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to forfeit all of his illegal proceeds.

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