The mastermind behind a multibillion-pound bitcoin fraud operation was finally snared after a police raid on a mansion in leafy Hampstead.
Today, Zhimin Qian was jailed for 11 years and eight months after masterminding a scam which led UK police to make their largest cryptocurrency seizure of more than £5 billion in Bitcoin.
Police found that Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, had hidden passwords and incriminating evidence down her jogging bottoms.
The 45-year-old fleeced 128,000 people in China in a Ponzi-style investment scheme before jetting to the UK using a St Kitts passport.
She then began money laundering on an industrial scale from her criminal headquarters in leafy Hampstead.
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She converted her ill-got gains into bitcoin and sought to buy property and bankrolled a luxury lifestyle.
Officers who raided her rented £5m north London pile in 2018 recovered £5bn in bitcoin – believed to be the largest seizure of cryptocurrency in UK history. A further £67m was recovered after her arrest.
Former Chinese takeaway worker in east London, Jian Wen, 43, helped her launder the money.
She went from serving rice dishes and living a modest lifestyle to residing at Qian’s six-bedroom Hampstead mansion and flying her son over from China so he could attend a private school.
For good measure, she also drove a Mercedes in keeping with her status as a newly rich criminal.
Wen was jailed for six years and eight months for her part in the illegal operation orchestrated by Qian.
She claimed Qian had duped her, and she believed she was working for a jewellery business with operations in Dubai and Malaysia.
Qian pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court to acquiring cryptocurrency that was criminal property and possessing it between October 2017 and April 2024.
However, she was not an easy person to track down, having done a moonlight flit from her Hampstead house before the police raided it in 2018.
She took with her codes which would allow her to continue to use her ill-got gains on the run, where she used a fixer to find her Airbnbs and keep her one step ahead of the law using hired help from the criminal underworld.
She was finally tracked down in the historic city of York last year, and police interviews revealed the huge scale of her fraud.
She even had a specially sewn-in pocket on the inside of her jogging bottoms, which contained written codes and passwords which showed the money trail.
Her writing down of the incriminating evidence enabled investigators to track down millions more and bring a watertight case against the fraudster.
A third fraudster, Hok Seng Ling, 46, who was said to be Qian’s ‘butler’ pleaded guilty to transferring criminally obtained bitcoin for her.
He helped her evade justice by booking Airbnbs and recruiting helpers, Southwark Crown Court had heard.
The head of the Met’s economic and cybercrime command, Will Lyne, said after the convictions: ‘This is one of the largest money-laundering cases in UK history and among the highest-value cryptocurrency cases globally. I am extremely proud of the team.
‘Through a meticulous investigation and unprecedented cooperation with Chinese law enforcement, we were able to obtain compelling evidence of the criminal origins of the cryptoassets Qian attempted to launder in the UK … My thoughts are with the thousands of victims defrauded in this scheme.’
DS 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.
‘I am immensely proud of the investigation team and our partners who have worked tirelessly on this case.’
Meanwhile, the Chinese victims originally tipped off by Qian are fighting to be refunded using the seized bitcoin.
That may see another legal tussle over who is entitled to the criminal funds, which are being held in the UK following an expensive and eventually successful police investigation uncovering one of the largest money laundering networks ever exposed in Britain.
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