A Chinese woman has been convicted in Britain after what police described as the world’s single largest cryptocurrency seizure – worth more than £5.5bn.
Zhimin Qian, 47, pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court on Monday to charges of illegally acquiring and possessing vast amounts in the form of bitcoin.
The Chinese national, who also goes by the name Yadi Zhang, was accused of leading a massive scam in China between 2014 and 2017 where she cheated more than 128,000 people, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
“Between 2014–2017, Zhang orchestrated a large-scale fraud in China through defrauding over 128,000 victims and went onto store the illegally obtained funds in bitcoin assets,” the police said.
At least 61,000 bitcoins have been seized from Qian, police officials said.
Qian fled China using false documents and entered the UK in September 2018. Police said she “attempted to launder the proceeds via purchasing property, with the assistance of an assailant, Jian Wen”.
Qian’s arrest and conviction bring to an end a seven-year investigation into her global money laundering scheme, the Met Police said.
Detective sergeant Isabella Grotto, who led the Met’s investigation, said: “Today marks the result of years of painstaking work.”
“When our team located Zhimin Qian, she had been evading justice for five years, and her arrest triggered a complex investigation requiring evidence from multiple jurisdictions and the careful review of thousands of documents,” she said.
“This is one of the largest money laundering cases in UK history and among the highest-value cryptocurrency cases globally,” said Will Lyne, the Met’s Head of Economic and Cybercrime Command.
The probe helped the Met secure “compelling evidence of the criminal origins of the cryptoassets Qian attempted to launder in the UK”.
Wen, a 44-year-old Chinese takeaway worker, helped Qian launder the proceeds from their scam and moved to a “multi-million pound rented house” in North London from her previous home above a restaurant, the Crown Prosecution Service said.
She was jailed for six years and eight months last year for her activities alongside Qian in the scam. The Met and CPS found suspiciously expensive purchases from Wen, including two properties in Dubai worth more than £500,000 and more than £300m worth of bitcoin.
The huge amounts of bitcoin involved, without any evidence on how it was procured by Wen, suggested that it was from a criminal source, the CPS said.
“Met investigators proved she had been involved in facilitating the movement of a cryptocurrency wallet, which contained 150 Bitcoin. At the relevant time this was valued at £1.7m,” the statement from Met added.
Police said Qian is being held in custody ahead of her sentencing, a date for which has not yet been set.
