A “Dubai Unlocked” leak pertaining to real-estate records in the UAE has tied over two dozen properties to OneCoin scammers.

The leak, shared and vetted by various media publications, also provides intel on OneCoin fugitive Frank Schneider.

The package covers the ownership and use of hundreds of thousands of properties in Dubai, as well as further personal information from their owners and users.

The information mostly comes from 2020 and 2022 and was verified for months with information from official sources.

Describing Dubai as an “Eldorado for oligarchs, drug lords and other underworld figures, in a paywalled May 15th article Der Spiegel reports OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova, also a fugitive, purchased a luxury apartment in Dubai in 2015 for ~2.4 million euros.

Ignatova sold her Dubai apartment in late 2019. At the time Ignatova had been indicted in the US and was wanted on OneCoin fraud charges.

Meanwhile, the suspected fraudsters bought one luxury property after another.

Co-founder Sebastian Greenwood was already based in Dubai and to this day he owns an opulent villa near the Montgomerie Golf Club.

Other OneCoin scammers who purchased property in Dubai include:

  • Stephan Steinkeller (right), a wanted fugitive in Italy, purchased a “207 square meter property for a good one million euros, as well as another two-room apartment in the newly developed harbor district for more than 500,000 euros” (the data shows Steinkeller still owns the property and rents it out for 70,000 euros a year)
  • Kari Wahlroos has “one villa and seven apartments” in Dubai
  • Frank Schneider “purchased a 270 square meter residence on the fifth floor of the “Serenia Residences” for around 1.7 million euros” in 2018 (Schneider sold the apartment in 2022 while under house arrest in France)

In total, the data can be used to assign more than two dozen Dubai properties to the OneCoin management team, for which they spent a double-digit million sum.

OCCRP reports OneCoin scammers were able to buy and sell properties in Dubai

despite a United Arab Emirates law in place since 2019 that requires realtors to run background checks on buyers and sellers of properties, and report any suspicious transactions to authorities.

UAE officials — including at the ministries of interior, economy, and justice — and Dubai Police did not respond to detailed questions from reporters about the sale of properties belonging to Ignatova and Schneider.

Prior to disappearing last year, Frank Schneider (right) referred to himself as a “Dubai-based businessman who travels tirelessly.”

Over the course of overseeing OneCoin’s money laundering operations and working closely with Ruja Ignatova, Schneider is reported to have personally stolen 14 million euros through various Dubai shell companies.

Reports Der Spiegel;

Until the beginning of the pandemic, the Luxembourger was “constantly coming and going” in the emirate, one of his acquaintances told reporters from the research team.

A fitness app recorded one of his training laps in 2020, 18 kilometers across the palm island.

OCCRP additionally reports;

Schneider’s most recent UAE ID data shows his residency was authorized through July 2023, which would have granted him lawful entry into Dubai at the time he escaped French custody.

Indonesia has also emerged as a potential place of interest with respect to Schneider’s whereabouts.

Schneider appeared as director of an Indonesia-registered company called White Orchid Management, described in registration documents as being set up in March 2020 to buy, sell, rent, and operate real estate.

On September 8, 2023 –– months after Schneider disappeared –– the shares of the company were transferred to his wife and son, and he left his position as director.

Neither Dubai or Indonesia have extradition treaties with the US.

Also worth noting is this exchange between former OneCoin top promoter Kari Wahlroos (right) and Der Spiegel;

[Wahlroos] a former major owner in Dubai, who says he is now in Malaysia – and has “nothing to do with Dubai anymore” – is more talkative.

All rumors that his former boss was murdered on a boat on behalf of a Bulgarian underworld figure in 2018 and that her body was dumped in the Ionian Sea are “bullshit”.

[Wahlroos] claims: she is alive and protected by powerful people, and he even has her number. Could he reveal them to the reporters? “Definitely not, I’m not a fucking rat.”

Malaysia does have an extradition treaty with the US. Whether Wahlroos is a person of interest to US authorities however is unclear.

Due to the proliferation of scams, sheltering of wanted fraudsters and failure to enforce securities fraud regulation, BehindMLM has ranked Dubai as the MLM crime capital of the world for years.

BehindMLM’s guidelines for Dubai remain unchanged:

  1. If someone lives in Dubai and approaches you about an MLM opportunity, they’re trying to scam you.
  2. If an MLM company is based out of or represents it has ties to Dubai, it’s a scam.