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Mason Wilder, CFE
ACFE Senior Research Specialist

If you were involved in promoting a multibillion dollar, international, cryptocurrency-based, multilevel marketing Ponzi scheme, what would you do for an encore? If you guessed “rinse and repeat,” you’d be accurately describing the decision-making of one Le Quoc-Hung, also known as Simon Le.

As the infamous OneCoin scheme’s aftermath left the sibling founders of the “cryptocurrency” facing a $4 billion class-action suit from its victims, Le pivoted from still promoting a multilevel marketing company already exposed as a scam, to launching a new version of the scheme under a new name: OneLink.

For those unfamiliar with OneCoin, it started as a cryptocurrency platform nominally based in Bulgaria around 2014 and began selling tokens, memberships and cryptocurrency trading materials to consumers all around the world, ultimately taking in at least $4 billion but possibly as much as $16 billion. The OneCoin platform incentivized recruitment of new members by paying commissions out of those new members’ investments, in a hybridization of traditional multilevel marketing and Ponzi scheme tactics. The cryptocurrency platform never featured a blockchain or set values for its coins internally. It also never followed through on promises that the currency would be exchangeable for other cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies such as euros or dollars, leaving all its members’ holdings completely devoid of any value.

Despite the OneCoin platform shutting down in 2017, marketers like Le were somehow still recruiting members into the scam or its subsidiary, OneLife, as recently as late-2019, even though dozens of company leaders and insiders had been arrested around the world. The co-founder and figurehead, Ruta Ignatova, had also disappeared two years earlier after living an extremely public life for years prior.

Whatever management structure of OneCoin remained in late-2019 reportedly promoted Le to “Captain” of the OneLife subsidiary in December of last year, where he promoted the company and remarkably still solicited investment into OneCoin. That is, until he registered OneLink’s website in March of this year and subsequently resigned from OneLife in April.

Now, from whereabouts unknown but speculated as potentially being in Dubai or Vietnam, Le promotes OneLink, which has no apparent products or services. What OneLink does offer is affiliate membership in exchange for an “investment” of $100-5,000. Upon becoming an affiliate, its members can market affiliate memberships to earn points and climb the seven affiliate ranks of the OneLink network while also receiving commissions of 10% on their recruits’ investments. But wait, there’s more! If the affiliates an investor recruited recruit their own affiliates, and those affiliates recruit their own affiliates, you get commissions on all the “downline” investments. Soon you could be at the top of a team of affiliates that, if visualized, strongly resembles a pyramid, coincidentally.

A quick look at the OneLink website reveals that members can learn how to earn more through OneSchool products and create merchant accounts to sell products through OneMall that can be advertised using a QR code generated by OnePassport. Other parts of the One Ecosystem that do not yet garner descriptions on the website but do feature in bright infographics are: OneLove, OneEntertainment and OneTrading. Apparently, an app for the network is “coming soon,” where you will probably be able to access all these features in one place.

It goes without saying that red flags abound with this whole premise. Unfortunately, OneLink will probably manage to swindle way too much money out of affiliate members, despite involving a founder formerly involved at a high level with a well-documented fraud scheme, not to mention a conspicuously similar name and business model. Anyone potentially interested in membership with OneLink would do well to conduct a modicum of research into the company, as a quick Google News search for “onelink” returns several top results referencing Ponzi schemes and scams. A little due diligence can go a long way.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

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