A woman caught with £5bn in Bitcoin in the UK’s highest ever value money laundering investigation has been jailed for 11 years and eight months – after nearly five years on the run. Zhimin Qian, 47, sat up in bed looking stunned when police kicked open the bedroom door of an Airbnb in a York suburb on 22 April last year. She vanished and went on the run after officers seized more than 61,000 Bitcoin in the country’s biggest cryptocurrency seizure in a raid of her rented £5m home next to Hampstead Heath. Qian – who fled China after carrying out a huge fraud and arrived in the UK in 2017 on a false St Kitts and Nevis passport in the name of Yadi Zhang – pleaded guilty to two money laundering offences at Southwark Crown Court.
Qian wept in the dock as she was sentenced to 11 years and eight months imprisonment. Judge Sally-Ann Hales KC told her: «You were the architect of this offending from its inception to its conclusion.» «The scale of your money laundering is unprecedented. Your motive was one of pure greed.» Police said she styled herself the «Goddess of Wealth» and wore imperial robes as her sales teams offered 300% returns at conferences in luxury hotels in China promoting her «Britain Nice Life Insurance» scheme. In a slick video played to targets, the narrator says «Britain is a nation of glories and dreams» over footage of the Houses of Parliament, Oxford University, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and the City of London.
Qian was already wanted in China over two other scams when she orchestrated the gigantic investment fraud, conning more than 128,000 victims from every province out of 40bn Yuan (around £4.6bn) between 2014 and 2017. More than 80 people have been convicted in China over the scam, but Qian converted some of the proceeds into more than 70,000 Bitcoin and fled, crossing the border into Myanmar on a moped before arriving at Heathrow Airport in September 2017.
She recruited Jian Wen, who left her job in a south London Chinese takeaway, and the women moved into a £17,000-a-month rented £5m house next to Hampstead Heath, posing as the bosses of an international jewelry business. They traveled extensively across Europe, buying jewelry and spending tens of thousands of pounds on designer clothes and shoes in Harrods, while Wen bought a £25,000 E-Class Mercedes and sent her son to the £6,000-a-term Heathside preparatory school. Qian made extensive notes about what the judge called her «grandiose» plans to increase her social standing. She wanted to meet a royal duke, hoped the Dalai Lama would anoint her as a reincarnated Goddess, and dreamed of ruling Liberland – an unrecognized micronation on the Croatian side of the Danube – as Queen.
But the women came to the attention of police when they tried to buy a £24m seven-bedroom Hampstead mansion with a swimming pool, using more than £800,000 converted from Bitcoin. Officers raided their home in October 2018 and seized £300,000 in cash and cheques, along with phones and laptops, and found a hand-drawn «treasure map» leading from Harrods to a safety deposit box containing more devices. When investigators finally accessed the cryptocurrency wallets stored on them, they thought someone had put the decimal point in the wrong place.
The 61,279 Bitcoin was then worth £1.4bn and has now soared to more than £5bn, making it the biggest ever cryptocurrency seizure in Britain and, until recently, the world. Read more: How Chinese takeaway worker led police to the biggest-ever Bitcoin seizure. Police believed Qian had left the country, but shortly before Wen was found guilty of money laundering offenses in March last year, Detective Constable Joe Ryan detected activity on a cryptocurrency exchange from a wallet linked to Qian, which hadn’t been used since 2019. The exchange provided details of the account holder – Seng Hok Ling, a Malaysian national with a previous conviction for fraud in Hong Kong in 2015, who was living in Matlock, Derbyshire.
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