Kate Winslet to act in Hollywood flick showing $4 billion Ethereum scam OneCoin
Kate Winslet is scheduled to star in an upcoming Hollywood movie chronicling the rise and fall of OneCoin, a notorious Ethereum-based Ponzi scheme that raked in $4 billion from victims worldwide.
Called โFake!,โ the movie based on the book by Jen McAdam with Douglas Thompson, based on the true-life story of Jen McAdam and her involvement with the OneCoin Ponzi scheme. The book is currently being shopped around to publishers for this yearโs Frankfurt Book Fair, as per entertainment website Deadline.
McAdam, a victim of OneCoinโs Ponzi scheme, founded a support group for those affected. McAdam and her friends and family invested and lost close to $300K, the report noted.
Helming the direction is Scott Z. Burns, who earlier shot the 2019 political drama The Report, a movie about Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones and his investigation into the CIAโs post 9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program. Burns will write and direct Fake!.
The movie will be the second team-up for Burns and Winslet. In 2011, the former wrote Contagion, a movie on a pandemic that grips Earth, in which Winslet starred.
For the uninitiated, the infamous OneCoin crypto scam was perpetrated by one Bulgarian individual Ruja Ignatova, along with Sebastian Greenwood. The duo had offshore and registered offices in Belize and Dubai, with Ignatova wooing her way to wealthy individuals across the world and allegedly raked in billions of dollars before disappearing.
According to the official courtย document, Mark Scott, a partner at international law firm Locke Lord, was accused of assisting Ruja in laundering more than $400 million. Scott is currently awaiting trial under house arrest after being released from a federal prison in New York on bond in 2018.
Most of OneCoinโs leaders have now disappeared or been arrested, but Ignatova is still at large. Greenwood was arrested in 2018, as was Ignatovaโs brother Konstantin Ignatov in March 2019, who pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and fraud at the time.
The movie is among the first crypto-centric entertainment forms featuring one of the biggest ever Hollywood stars. Similar other flicks were โCrypto,โ a 2019 movie starring Liam Hemsworth revolving around money laundering via cryptocurrencies.