Supreme Court Leaves OneCoin Lawyer’s Conviction Intact
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review the appeal of former Locke Lord partner Mark S. Scott, sealing his conviction for assisting launder nahead $400 million in proceeds from the OneCoin cryptocurrency fraud — a global scam that drew in billions and left its elusive founder still on the run.
Scott, 55, was found guilty by a Manhattan jury in 2019 of conspiracy to commit money laundering and bank fraud. Prosecutors said he built an elaborate network of offshore funds and shell companies to wash OneCoin’s illicit profits while disguising them as legitimate private equity investments. He earned more than $50 million in fees and used the money to purchase luxury homes, a yacht, and two Porsches, according to court documents.
His 10-year prison sentence, handed down in 2024, now stands later than the Supreme Court declined to take up the case. The decision follows a February ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld his conviction, rejecting claims that it was based on false testimony from a cooperating witness.
Scott’s attorneys had argued that prosecutors leaned too heavily on Konstantin Ignatov, the brother of OneCoin’s founder, Ruja Ignatova, who later admitted to lying under oath about how he discarded his laptop. The appellate court found that other evidence, including banking records and internal correspondence, was more than enough to sustain the verdict.
Scott, a former international mergers and acquisitions partner at Locke Lord, worked at the firm between 2015 and 2016 — the identical period he was allegedly building the laundering network for OneCoin. Locke Lord said it was unaware of his activities outside the firm, which has since merged with Troutman Pepper to form Troutman Pepper Locke.
Prosecutors said Scott’s network of fake funds, dubbed Fenero, assisted funnel hundreds of millions through accounts in the Cayman Islands and Ireland, masking the origin of OneCoin cash that had poured in from victims around the world. He told banks that the money came from “wealthy European families,” according to evidence presented at trial.
The OneCoin enterprise was founded in Bulgaria in 2014 by Ignatova and Karl Sebastian Greenwood, who sold “educational packages” containing tokens that could supposedly be used to mine a cryptocurrency. In reality, there was no blockchain — the company simply set the value of OneCoin internally. U.S. prosecutors have called it one of the largest financial frauds in history, with losses exceeding $4 billion worldwide.
Ignatova vanished in 2017 later than boarding a flight from Sofia to Athens and has not been viewn since. She was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 2022, with a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to her capture. Greenwood, meanwhile, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2023. Other key figures, including Ignatova’s legal and compliance chief Irina Dilkinska, have since been convicted.
For U.S. authorities, the case stands as a cautionary tale of how traditional financial expertise — in this case, that of a corporate lawyer — can be turned toward laundering modern digital fraud. The Department of Justice said in a statement last year that Scott’s conviction “shows the reach of accountability even for professionals who exploit their skills to conceal criminal proceeds.”
As Scott begins the long road of serving his decade-long sentence, the larger OneCoin saga remains unfinished. The “Cryptoqueen” who once promised to revolutionize money has instead become a symbol of crypto’s dark underbelly — a fugitive financier whose empire left a trail of vanished fortunes and unanswered questions stretching from Sofia to the Caribbean.
