Former BusinessForHome owner Ted Nuyten was contacted by the City of London Police over his OneCoin shilling.

The disclosure was made in a trove of documents made public by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. Documents the law firm Carter-Ruck fought to keep from the public.

Nuyten sold BusinessForHome to Vida Divina founder and ANMP board member Armand Puyolt earlier this year.

Circa 2015 to 2017 though Nuyten was in charge, and it wasn’t uncommon for BusinessForHome to be shilling various MLM Ponzi schemes. One of those Ponzi schemes was OneCoin.

BehindMLM loosely tracked Nuyten’s Ponzi shilling on BusinessForHome. Perhaps the peak of the OneCoin shilling was Nuyten appearing in OneCoin marketing videos stylized as interviews:

Nuyten’s OneCoin shilling on BusinessForHome didn’t go unnoticed by authorities.

The City of London Police (CoLP) announced they were investigating OneCoin in September 2016.

In December 2016, Kieran Vaughan, of the CoLP’s Economic Crime Directorate, reached out to BusinessForHome.

The City of London Police is currently investigating the company OneCoin and linked entities including OneLife. I am concerned that people in the UK who have paid money to OneCoin may be victims of fraud.

I have read several articles and pages from your website and am concerned that they may influence people to invest in OneCoin.

In particular, I would highlight the “Top Earners Ranks” page which lists a number of OneCoin members with high value estimated earnings.

I appreciate that these articles are several months old however, they can be found easily through a basic Google search.

Having read the Ted Nuyten article dated 26th February 2016, I note that Mr. Nuyten states that “Business For Home do not endorse companies, we provide information”. I also note that in the same article, Mr. Nuyten states (in reference to the debate if OneCoin is legit or not), “I am the scorekeeper and not a lawyer”.

I fear that although your intention might be to remain independent, your articles appear to be biased towards OneCoin and have the potential to encourage vulnerable and impressionable people to invest money in the company.

Vaughan asked Nuyten to re went on to cite multiple regulatory fraud warnings pertaining to OneCoin, none of which BusinessForHome had covered. In the interest of public safety, Vaughan also asked Nuyten to remove BusinessForHome’s OneCoin shill articles.

To the best of my knowledge Nuyten never publicly disclosed the City of London Police had reached out to him. At the time, Nuyten was in a unique position to inform consumers of CoLP’s concerns.

Instead, Nuyten appears to have forwarded CoLP’s correspondence to OneCoin, who in turn forwarded it to Carter-Ruck.

Quoting Carter-Ruck attorney Claire Frances Gill, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported on October 7th;

Email extracts show that Carter-Ruck warned its client that the issue would need to be addressed carefully.

“We cannot necessarily stop the police taking these actions during an investigation,” Gill wrote, “but we need to complain about it and give the [police] cause to doubt their investigation and to force them to question if they are on the right track.”

Carter-Ruck sent CoLP a letter, claiming Vaughan’s concerns about Nuyten’s OneCoin shilling on BusinessForHome was “obviously defamatory” towards OneCoin.

Three weeks later Carter-Ruck raised the stakes. The firm emailed Vaughan’s boss, the head of the economic crime directorate, complaining about the lack of a response and reiterating that the detective’s actions were “of serious concern to our clients”.

“DC Vaughan is making defamatory statements about our clients to publishers of foreign websites, and using baseless threats of legal action to intimidate them into taking material down,” the firm wrote.

Around the same time OneCoin investor Jennifer McAdam began publicizing a recording of a phonecall she’d had with Vaughan.

On the call, which McAdam recorded without Vaughan’s knowledge and is transcribed in the tribunal documents, she asked: “Is [OneCoin] a scam, Kieron?”

Vaughan replied: “We believe so and that’s what we’re investigating. They’ve deceived a lot of people who’ve invested in it and we have our concerns, so yeah absolutely. There’s stuff I can’t tell you about at the moment, which will come out soon enough, which gives us concerns.”

That prompted Carter-Ruck to take action against McAdam on OneCoin’s behalf. Communications between Claire Gill and McAdam led to Gill’s prosecution recommendation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in August 2025.

Back in 2017, Carter-Ruck continued to harass CoLP over Vaughan’s statements throughout the year.

On 9 August, it wrote to Douglas Barrow, the chairman of the Police Committee, which oversees the City of London Police force.

“You will no doubt be concerned to ensure that City of London Police is seen to be operating with absolute integrity and professionalism; we are concerned that on this occasion it has fallen short of those standards,” the firm wrote.

She emphasised that OneCoin had not been charged let alone convicted.

On 27 October, solicitors for the police finally provided a substantive response. In a blistering 10-page letter contained in the tribunal bundle, they outlined a litany of issues with OneCoin.

OneCoin collapsed the same month CoLP sent their response to Carter-Ruck. CoLP eventually dropped their OneCoin investigation in September 2019.

As for Carter-Ruck, their defense appears to be an attempt to rewrite history;

In an email to another partner at the firm on 25 May, [Gill] raised OneCoin’s risk level from “standard” to “high”.

Emails in the bundle show Gill explaining her decision: “The corporate set up is complex, the client is based abroad, and [co-founder] Ruja Ignatova has a conviction in Germany for fraud dating from March 2016.” She also referred to criminal investigations in the UK and the US.

Responding to TBIJ, a spokesperson for Carter-Ruck said it is not the SRA’s case that Gill or any of her colleagues or legal advisers knew that OneCoin was a fraud, and that: “Ms Gill and her colleagues certainly had no such knowledge.”

In January 2018, a few months after OneCoin’s collapse, Nuyten announced BusinessForHome would no longer be shilling OneCoin.

As a result of the collapse of the network marketing arm of Onecoin – the Onelife network – we have decide to remove the top earners from the BusinessForHome ranks.

Particularly damning content, including the previously cited Ted Nuyten OneLife interviews, were quietly unpublished.

By then of course the damage had been done. Through shilling on BusinessForHome, Nuyten had already played his role in contributing to OneCoin consumer losses.

US authorities would go on to peg OneCoin investor losses at over $4 billion. How much of that was paid to Nuyten in exchange for shill content is unknown.

Today, even under new ownership, various OneCoin shill articles are still published on BusinessForHome:

Nuyten has never publicly acknowledged or apologized for his role in shilling OneCoin. Promotion of the Ponzi scheme, and others like it, remain an unaddressed stain on BusinessForHome’s legacy.