Authorities in Guernsey, a British Crown Dependency, have seized $11.4 million (£9 million) in assets linked to the OneCoin fraud, one of the largest and longest-running crypto scams on record.
Authorities did not indicate whether additional assets linked to OneCoin remain under review. No new criminal charges were announced. The funds were reportedly held in an account at RBS International in Guernsey under the name Aquitaine Group Limited.
Decrypt has reached out to Guernsey authorities for comment and will update this article should they respond.
“OneCoin's fraud predates modern on-chain detection capabilities. Today's threat detection systems can identify suspicious patterns in real-time, including transactions funded by mixer services,” Ohad Shperling, CEO of modular Web3 security firm IronBlocks, told Decrypt.
Shperling noted that had these technologies “existed and been widely deployed” in 2014 when OneCoin launched, the scheme “might have been curtailed earlier through automated flagging of abnormal transaction patterns and unverified contract interactions.”
The recovery at Guernsey only represents “roughly 0.2% of total OneCoin losses” and shows that “formidable barriers to comprehensive asset recovery in cryptocurrency fraud cases” still remain.
Still, Shperling said, there's reason for "measured optimism" that recoveries could materialize over the next several years.
The more immediate opportunity, he said, lies in prevention, with advances in on-chain monitoring making it easier to flag potentially fraudulent activity “in their early stages, before they reach OneCoin's catastrophic scale.”
