Zhimin Qian, a Chinese woman who used money stolen from thousands of pensioners in China to buy cryptocurrency now valued in billions of pounds, has been sentenced to 11 years and eight months in prison for money laundering.
The judge said that Zhimin was the main planner behind the entire crime and acted out of pure greed. After escaping from China, Qian settled in a luxury mansion in Hampstead, north London. About a year later, the Metropolitan Police raided the house and discovered one of the largest single cryptocurrency hauls ever recorded.
Here’s a peek into her masterplan:
Qian lived lavishly before UK’s biggest crypto bust
The 47-year-old Zhimin fled China in 2017 using a fake passport after police began investigating her for fraud, reported BBC. She settled in a luxury mansion near Hampstead Heath in London, paying over £17,000 a month in rent. To fund her lavish lifestyle, she needed to turn her huge Bitcoin holdings into cash, so she pretended to be a rich antiques and diamond heiress. She hired a former restaurant worker as her assistant and asked her to trade cryptocurrency into cash and property, the report added.
As Bitcoin’s value soared, Qian lived a life of comfort, spending her days gaming and shopping online while her company promised investors effortless wealth. But her diary revealed bigger ambitions, the BBC report said. She planned to start an international bank, buy a castle in Sweden, befriend a British duke, and even become the “queen” of Liberland, a self-proclaimed microstate between Croatia and Serbia.
Her extravagant property hunt in Totteridge Common raised suspicion when her assistant couldn’t explain the source of her wealth. Police later raided her Hampstead home, discovering hard drives filled with tens of thousands of Bitcoins, which is the largest cryptocurrency seizure in UK history.
Investigators say Qian had founded her company, Lantian Gerui (or Bluesky Greet), four years earlier in China. It claimed to mine Bitcoin and invest in new technologies, but authorities believe it was a massive Ponzi scheme that lured investors with false promises of high returns.
Zhimin duped over 100,000 investors
More than one lakh people in China invested in Qian Zhimin’s company, believing it was creating advanced health technology and mining cryptocurrency. But police later found that she had stolen the money for herself.
One investor, Yu, said he had trusted the company because he received small daily payments of around 100 yuan, which made everyone believe the business was genuine. Many even borrowed more money to invest.
The company rewarded investors for bringing in new members, helping the scam spread across all Chinese provinces. Court records show that around 120,000 people lost a total of over 40 billion yuan. A former employee later revealed that these payments came from new investors’ money, not from real crypto profits, the BBC report said.
