Nilam Farooq plays the most wanted criminal "The richer you get, the worse your taste becomes"
In the TV series "Take the Money and Run", Nilam Farooq plays the most wanted woman in the world. Ruja Ignatova founded a fake cryptocurrency, got caught and fled. A conversation about the addiction to money.
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- The six-part TV series "Take the Money and Run" (now available in the ZDF media library) tells the story of one of the biggest financial fraud cases of all time.
- With a special twist: German-Bulgarian Ruja Ignatova, founder of the fake cryptocurrency OneCoin, has been a fugitive for almost nine years.
- When her fake cryptocurrency, with which she had mainly fleeced the poorest people in the world, came to light, she fled with a sum of up to 20 billion.
- In this interview, 36-year-old Nilam Farooq ("Contra") talks about the migrant parallels between her and Ignatova and the limits of what money can achieve in life.
Nilam Farooq, you play Ruja Ignatova, the biggest financial fraudster of all time and the most wanted woman in the world. Have you tried to find out where she might be?
Everyone involved in the case has their own theory. Mine at the beginning was that she was dead. Ruja Ignatova has made enemies of many dangerous people. In the middle of the shoot, the news came that the FBI had significantly increased her bounty. They don't do that for no reason. I assume there are new clues.
Where do most people think she's hiding?
The most common theory is that she's living on a yacht in international waters. That she looks very different from before and occasionally goes unrecognized on the mainland. She has a husband and a daughter who live near Frankfurt.
Her husband has got off lightly in legal terms so far. But there is also to be a new trial. It's an incredible story that a person manages not to be found for years - especially as she left her husband and child behind. And this despite all the efforts and money invested in the search.
How is it even possible in this day and age to disappear and not be found?
Yes, you might think: it's impossible today. However, social media and the digital world also offer opportunities to lay false trails. Overall, it is certainly more difficult to disappear completely today than it used to be. Because the world has become smaller and people have become more transparent and therefore more traceable.
But I find the psychological factor of deciding to disappear even more difficult to understand. You leave people behind. For me, that would be an exclusion criterion for starting a completely new life somewhere - without contact with the old one.
Your character and you have in common that you both grew up as migrant children in Germany. In the series, Ruja's motivation is to seek success by any means necessary. Also because her father failed as a "foreigner". Can you understand that drive?
Yes, there is this similarity and another one: that we both have a little brother. Nevertheless, I didn't deal with this motivation because I decided from the beginning that I didn't want to understand this character. Ruja Ignatova is a very clever woman. She can reflect well. In this respect, I don't want to make excuses for her actions: no childhood, no migration, no nothing.
But one thing we have in common that I can relate to is that we are both good with men. I am fearless when dealing with them, and she always was. Morally or psychologically, however, I didn't want to let this person get too close to me.
Don't you have to accept every character in order to play them?
I did want to get into her psyche. But I don't want to use her childhood or migrant background to justify her actions. She was definitely obsessed with greatness and success. And prepared to use the most dastardly means to achieve both.
After all, you were once the most successful YouTuber in Germany. You probably don't get that just like that ...
It wasn't a title I worked towards. Success sometimes just happens when you're in the right place at the right time with your content. In my time, YouTube was still quite new, kind of avant-garde and not yet so competitive. Nevertheless, I can relate to the fact that people say: What I do should be successful.
When I make a movie or a series, I want the project to be successful. Because I know how hard a lot of people have worked on it. We put blood, sweat and love into "Take The Money And Run". I don't do something like this so that nobody sees it in the end. I want the series to be as successful as possible.
But when I think in Ruja dimensions, I realize how I can't even imagine them in my head. The woman defrauded people on such a grand scale and ran off with 20 billion. Many of the victims were poor farmers, for example from Africa. This has nothing to do with the healthy pursuit of success.
How can people justify cheating poor people in order to live in immeasurable wealth themselves?
There is a saying: the richer you get, the worse your taste becomes. This is also true for some people in terms of their value system. It was definitely the case with Ruja. Many of the super-rich developed an addiction to making money at some point. And it's like any other addiction: You always want more.
Ruja is a numbers-driven person. I think she has developed an addiction to very large numbers and has completely lost her human compass. From a purely logical point of view, it no longer makes sense to want to earn even more money. After ten billion at the latest, you no longer need to fulfill all the desires that our world offers for money.
Is there a kind of luxury that you love? Something you would say: Great that I can afford that.
I'm not someone who collects shoes or bags. For me, luxuries are down-to-earth things: owning a home or being able to go on vacation. I'm not one of those people who say that money doesn't make you happy. I do think that money makes you happy to a certain extent.
Above all, it creates opportunities that you wouldn't have without money. I'm doing well. I can afford a few things that make me happy. And yet many things happen in life that have nothing to do with money. Two years ago, my dad died and I couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't have done anything with all the money in the world. A life event like that puts things back into perspective. I like money, I know its value, but I also know where the limits are.
What is above money for you?
Things that you can only influence to a limited extent: Health above all. I simply wish everyone good health on their birthday. It's the best gift. I also feel lucky when I can earn money and fill my time with what I like best: acting. I often think to myself what a luxury it is to be able to finance my life in this way. It's a happiness that you can't put a price on.
For years there has been a trend for films and series to be produced about impostors. What fascinates people so much about these stories?
I think it's the same mechanisms that work in crime thrillers. People want to know who the murderer is and how he did it. It's the same with scams and con artists: people want to know how these people did it.
That they were able to deceive people into trusting them with their money. How can it be that a house of cards, which you have to build in order to pull off a big scam successfully, doesn't collapse at any point?
And the other side - the victims: are we also interested in them?
Yes - in the sense that we ask ourselves: could this have happened to me? Would I be susceptible to this seduction, to this person and his scam?
Scams are always about ecstasy. Dollar bills fly through the air, there's champagne and caviar galore. Why is that?
It's the game of success that many people like to play. We humans have our rituals that we go through. I know them from movie premieres and awards ceremonies. Everyone dresses up. Of course there's champagne there too. It's about seeing and being seen. Of course, everyone's playing pretend, which is somehow appropriate for the movie business.
I can enjoy it, but you can't take it too seriously. You also have to remember that these scenes of euphoria or excess are also about drugs: It's also about the drugs that are taken there. For many, they are also part of making money on a grand scale. I can't do anything with that. But I know where it all comes from.
