Chinese woman jailed after $10 billion crypto seizure

“Organised crime groups are using cryptocurrency to move, hide, and invest the profits of serious crime – but every crypto transaction leaves a trace,” said Will Lyne, The Met’s head of economic and cybercrime.

Qian was behind an unlicensed Chinese investment company that collected 40 billion renminbi ($US5.6 billion) from about 128,000 investors across China between 2014 and 2017, the prosecutors said in the London court before she was sentenced.

She “accepts her conviction and the mistakes that led to it,” Roger Sahota, her lawyer, said after the sentencing. “She never set out to commit fraud but recognises her investment schemes were fraudulent and misled those who trusted her.”

When Chinese authorities raided an event organised by the firm in 2017, Qian escaped and travelled to London through southeast Asian nations using a fake p***port from St. Kitts and Nevis, according to the prosecutors.

In the UK she hired Jian Wen, a fast-food worker, who was sentenced last year to more than six years in jail for helping her launder money. Qian used Wen and Ling to rent expensive houses, buy jewelry and properties in Dubai and spend tens of thousands of pounds on lavish shopping sprees, the prosecutors said.

“Lied and schemed”

“You lied and schemed, all the while seeking to benefit yourself,” the judge said referring to Qian. “With the ***istance of people you recruited and whose loyalty you bought, you succeeded in evading justice for over seven years.”

Qian “spent lavishly and travelled extensively” avoiding countries which had extradition treaties with China, the judge said.

A city law firm first raised concerns to police about an attempt to buy properties in London using suspicious Bitcoin. Police subsequently seized the 61,000 Bitcoin and Wen was later arrested. Qian though, remained on the run living in luxurious mansions in Scotland and York, prosecutors said.

Wen was still facing trial in February 2024, when a transfer of 8.2 Bitcoin into a cryptocurrency wallet that was being watched by police led to Qian’s arrest from her mansion in York.

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There the police found scattered across the house a number of digital devices with wallets that carried crypto***ets worth more than £60 million ($121 million) and about £48,000 in cash along with jewellery.

She wanted to buy a big house and sell £200,000 in Bitcoin a month to pay for her expenses in order to become “the monarch of Liberland,” prosecutors alleged. Liberland is a strip of no-man’s land sandwiched between Croatia and Serbia on the western bank of the Danube River

After the arrest, Qian declined to comment to most questions by the police but said “she felt she would die soon, and it was her last chance to spend,” the prosecutors said.