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A Chinese woman, Qian Zhimin, has been sentenced to 11 years and eight months for money laundering after masterminding a gigantic investment fraud that left over 100,000 Chinese pensioners defrauded of billions of yuan.
The conviction stems from the single largest cryptocurrency seizure in UK history, an astonishing hoard of over 61,000 Bitcoin, now valued at around £5 billion ($6.3 billion), which Qian converted from the stolen funds.
Passing sentence at Southwark Crown Court, Judge Sally-Ann Hales KC condemned the 47-year-old, telling her she was “the architect of this offending from its inception to its conclusion,” driven by a motive of “pure greed.”
Qian’s company, Lantian Gerui (Bluesky Greet), initially promised investors, many of them middle-aged and elderly, high returns from crypto-mining and tech investments.
In reality, police say the company was an elaborate pyramid scheme, using new investors’ money to provide small, regular payouts to keep the deception going.
Victims, like Mr. Yu, who saw his marriage fail as a result of the fraud, were often encouraged to borrow heavily to invest more, believing the company’s grand promises of becoming “rich while lying down.”
Fleeing China in 2017 after police started investigating, Qian entered the UK on a fake passport. She quickly established a luxurious life, renting a £17,000-a-month mansion in Hampstead, north London, where she posed as a wealthy heiress.
To convert her vast Bitcoin stash into spendable cash and property, she hired a personal assistant, Wen Jian (who was jailed last year for her role). Qian’s diary revealed “grandiose” plans for the future, including founding an international bank, buying a Swedish castle, and even becoming the “Queen of Liberland,” an unrecognised microstate.
Her attempts to buy an especially large London property triggered a police investigation. Officers raided her rented home in 2018, seizing the hard drives and laptops loaded with the cryptocurrency. Despite being on the run for nearly five years after the initial seizure, police finally tracked and arrested her in a York suburb last year.
The enormous £5 billion haul is now the subject of a High Court battle. Thousands of Chinese victims are fighting to recover their stolen life savings, hoping the UK authorities will show “compassion.”
However, with any unclaimed funds typically defaulting to the UK government, the Treasury could stand to gain significantly from one of the world’s most valuable criminal seizures.
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