Sometimes documentary makers struggle very hard to find their subjects. In the case of Lie To Me (an international premiere March 18 at CPH:DOX), the subject came direct to the filmmakers. In fact, he rang them up.
“This is our third film on blockchain technology,” Norwegian filmmaker Bår Tyrmi points out. He also worked on The Bitcoin Experiment (2015) and Code of Trust (2019). These two films, also made through Hacienda Film, were screened widely.
One man who watched and admired Code of Trust was Bjørn Bjercke, the Bitcoin expert and whistleblower. “He really liked it and he contacted us. He said guys, I’ve seen your film. Google me and I’ll phone you back in 20 minutes.”
They followed his instructions and were immediately pulled into the “rabbit hole” of OneCoin, the fraudulent cryptocurrency presided over by the glamorous Bulgarian-born German swindler Ruja Ignatova, soon to be become one of the FBI’s “most wanted” felons.
After the initial conversation with Bjercke, the filmmakers (Tyrmi and producer Dag Mykland) were to spend over three years researching and filming. Their travels took them everywhere from north London to Uganda, from the Nordics to Germany and North America.
How did they navigate their way through the OneCoin maze?
“That was actually a challenge,” the director admits. “We spent a lot of time in the edit trying to find out how we organise this. When you look at it now, you’ll see we try to follow the OneCoin case chronologically. We have that as a backbone…”
The story stretches from 2016 to the present day. Bizarrely, as the film reveals, some people still believe in OneCoin (which was relaunched recently by new players OneEcosystem) although it has been demonstrated beyond dispute that the scheme was always a gigantic fraud.
“Always the challenge when you have so many characters is to know how to weigh them,” Tyrmi observes.
There are three main subjects here, all with very different relationships to OneCoin. Bjercke is the clear-sighted hero who sees through the scam from the start. Duncan Arthur is the insider, a South African banker who worked for the company. Jonatan Wigerup is the credulous investor with dollar signs in his eyes who pumps far more money than he can safely afford into the scheme.
“What was interesting is that they know of each other and their paths cross. That ties the film together,” the director says of the protagonists.
Duncan in particular is an enigmatic character. He’s a hearty and friendly figure who loves to hold forth about life over a pint of beer at the pub. He claims he was misled by his bosses. Nonetheless, he was at the heart of the business and didn’t seem quite as innocent as he was claiming.
What did the filmmakers think of him?
“OK, I have to be careful,” Tyrmi laughs. “He is an opportunist, 100%, very charismatic and well spoken. He is quite a likeable guy but he would throw you under the bus for anything. This guy, he grew up in apartheid era South Africa. His parents were anti-apartheid lawyers but Duncan’s rebellion to them was to join the apartheid regime’s police and intelligence service.”
By contrast, Bjercke is a man of strict principle, ready to testify that OneCoin was a scam, whatever the personal cost to him. He still lives at a hidden address. “Once he puts his mind to something, he doesn’t let go. Once he puts his mind to something, he will finish it.”
For Bjercke, exposing the fraud was a deeply personal matter. He is a “tech nerd” who believes in blockchain and felt that OneCoin was “dragging its reputation into the mud.” He also saw at first hand the huge financial loss and personal suffering that the swindle was causing. “He just wouldn’t have it!”
OneCoin was targeted “at networks which had already trust in them.” The Muslim, Jewish Orthodox and deaf communities were all enthusiastic investors in the cryptocurrency. Family members would often encourage their relatives to pump money into it.
“You see that all over Europe. You see that in London, in Uganda. All over the world, they used that entrance point to reach a lot of people and to gain their trust. We didn’t know that up front but it became apparent as we researched the film.”
The OneCoin public events were like a cross between pop concerts and religious revivalist meetings with thousands of fans hanging on every word from the Messiah-like Ruja Ignatov.
OneCoin in its original incarnation soon collapsed. Ruja vanished as if into thin air. Some speculated that she had been murdered. Others still think she is hiding out. (The filmmakers themselves think she is holed up in South Africa). Her brother Konstantin Ignatov was arrested in LA and thrown into prison. Strangely, he has just been released after spending only 34 months behind bars – a suspiciously short sentence given that he was part of a fraud which deprived investors of a reported $4 billion worldwide. Observers believe he may have struck a deal with the FBI. Maybe he’ll lead them to his sister. There are bound to be people out there who wish him harm. He may well have a grudge of his own against Duncan who may have tipped off the authorities about him.
There is, then, bad feeling on every side.
Lie To Me received funding form the Norwegian Film Institute and backed by broadcasters including NRK and SVT. The filmmakers hope to reach a mass audience on TV. “We want it to be seen by as many people as possible. Really, the reason we made this film is to help people see the red light with these kinds of scams. People can stop and ask themselves if this is too good to be true. If it walks like a rat and smells like a rat, it is probably a rat.”
But this isn’t just a film about a giant swindle. It’s also a cautionary tale about human nature and the naive greed we all feel from time to time. “If we want to believe something, we just believe it and we don’t see all the warning signs,” the director cautions. “If you look at the stock market, people just want so much to get rich and successful. They just don’t see any of the worrying signs…”
