With affiliates unable to withdraw their Ponzi points, the stakes for OneCoin have never been higher. The 2018 date for going public has bought the company some time but alone isn’t enough to placate affiliates who’s invested and lost money.

Enter the glitzy global event in Macau, which serve as a distraction from the predicament OneCoin affiliates find themselves in.

On April 27th the German website Gerlach Report published an article titled “OneCoin: Meeting in Macau prohibited by China” (auto translate).

This was followed up on May 1st with another article titled, “OneCoin: Macau police want to arrest leadership”.

I covered the initial report here on BehindMLM. I was a bit skeptical of the second article though, because the alleged methodology of the Macau police struck me as odd.

Yesterday evening OneCoin held its May 7th Macau event and, at least as far as we know, no police were present. Certainly there have been no reports of any arrests being made.

This prompted me, along with many of you sure, to turn to the Gerlach Report for an explanation. Unfortunately as at the time of publication, none has been provided.

The Gerlach Report publish articles in batches, with the latest gone live a few hours ago. There’s an article about a German OneCoin scammer but nothing about the Macau event.

Given the interest in the story, I’m assuming this will be addressed in the next 24 hours. If not, the credibility of the Gerlach Report going forward is severely questionable.

And that’d be odd, seeing as the outlet is marketing itself on a platform of trust and credibility.

Along with the German OneCoin scammer article today, the Gerlach Report also published an article titled, “We are looking for you as a reporter”.

The gerlachreport is incorruptible. We do not disappear reports against payment. We are not part of a system that still writes positively when the company is at an end and the responsible persons have made the money out of the traffic jam.

We are critical. Forged our opponents as “greasy” . We get murders and are offended.

As a reporter, you have to endure that. For it is really the knighthood for good work.

22 percent of our readers find our reports “overdated and wrong “, 10 percent of which are “unilateral and unfair “. But 61 per cent consider the gerlachreport as “compulsory “, read it daily.

The gerlachreport is also “an important medium” reports “up-to-date and informative”, “helpful and competent” and above all “credible and honest”.

Yeah, alright then. While I can attest to covering the  MLM underbelly not being perhaps the safest arm of journalism (I speak from almost a decade of experience), the timing of Gerlach Report’s claims of credibility and honesty seems suspect.

Pending a full explanation from the Gerlach Report’s editor(s) I’d be taking anything you can’t independently verify (nobody was able to independently verify Gerlach Report’s claims about Macau police or the Studio City hotel), with a grain of salt.

With respect to the OneCoin event itself, there’s not a lot to report on. Some guy nobody has ever heard of was appointed CEO of OneCoin, with Pablo Munoz remaining the all but invisible CEO of OneLife.

By all appearances, OneCoin is still very much run by Ruja Ignatova, Sebastian Greenwood and their backers.

Despite being brought on stage to explain “what is happening to the company and what is happening to you (OneCoin affiliates)”, Ignatova failed to address the recent arrest of OneCoin affiliates in India, the German regulator BaFin banning OneCoin nationally or an Italian regulatory investigation concluding OneCoin is a pyramid scheme.

Between the Indian arrests and German ban, over 30 million euro of funds invested into OneCoin have been seized. Surely this is a company crisis that needed addressing?

Instead OneCoin affiliates were told to invest in virtual shares, on the promise of OneCoin floating a shell company at some point.

It’s worth reiterating that the whole float a shell company shtick is a playbook from Frank Rickett’s OPN scam.

After the OPN shell company ST Communities was delisted from the British GXG Stock Exchange, OPN listed Global Digital Systems PLC, another shell company, on the Cyprus stock exchange.

Worth €0.248 back in 2014, today Global Digital Systems PLC shares have fallen 92% to just €0.022 EUR. OPN collapsed and was sold off to OneCoin in early 2016.

OneCoin meanwhile stopped affiliates converting OneCoin points into real money back in January.

This is significant because Ignatova estimates that some 95% of OneCoin affiliates have invested on the expectation of turning a profit as OneCoin arbitrarily increases the value of their points.

OPN’s collapse saw every affiliate who was duped into investing in worthless shell company shares lose money. With Ricketts once again at the helm, history is now repeating itself in OneCoin.

Looking forward, prior to OneCoin collapsing in 2018 we’ve got the London police investigation into OneCoin yet to play out and German and Indian regulators also continuing their respective investigations.

Pending an explanation from the Gerlach Report over the next 24 to 48 hours, stay tuned…

 

Update 9th May 2017 – Citing “confidential documents and protocols”, the Gerlach Report they didn’t realize what they were told meant the event would go ahead anyway.

In an article published on May 8th, the Gerlach Report claim Macau police photographed and recorded the details of all attendees of the OneCoin event.

That information has purportedly been “entered into an international OneCoin file”, for use by any authorities investigating OneCoin.

Time to source your information guys. If it’s a “confidential report” then you at least need to provide a blurry screenshot or something. It’s starting to sound an awful lot like James Bond style fiction…