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A crypto fugitive who orchestrated a multibillion-pound Ponzi scheme to defraud investors in China before she fled the country on a moped and made her way to London has been jailed in the most valuable money-laundering case ever heard in the UK.
Zhimin Qian, 47, was sentenced to 11 years and eight months on Tuesday at Southwark Crown Court after an investigation in which London’s Metropolitan Police seized a bitcoin fortune now valued at about £5bn.
Prosecutors said that between 2014 and 2017, the Chinese national defrauded more than 128,000 victims — many of whom lost their life savings — out of £4.6bn in total, before converting a chunk of the proceeds into bitcoin.
Qian sobbed in the dock as an interpreter relaid to her judge Sally-Ann Hales’ sentencing remarks. “The scale of your money laundering is unprecedented,” Hales told her. “Your motive was one of pure greed.”
Her Malaysian accomplice, Seng Hok Ling, also 47, received a sentence of four years and 11 months for his role in dealing with illegal funds.
The sentencing draws to a close what Scotland Yard said was among the most complex economic crime investigations it had ever undertaken, which led to the world’s largest confirmed cryptocurrency seizure by law enforcement.
The court heard how, after coming to the attention of Chinese authorities, Qian crossed the border into Myanmar in July 2017 on a moped with few possessions other than a laptop containing her illegal cryptocurrency haul.
Using false passports, Qian travelled onward to Thailand, Laos and finally the UK, where prosecutors said she sought to establish a “new life” under a false identity.
Police said the fugitive lived a lavish lifestyle in Britain. She rented a property in Hampstead, north London, for £17,333 per month. Over a period of three months, she spent about £92,500 at Harrods, the luxury department store.
However, attempts to purchase high-value real estate raised suspicion about the source of the funds. Police searched the Hampstead house in October 2018 and seized 61,000 Bitcoin stored on electronic devices.
Qian spent about six years “at large”, staying in luxury hotels and sightseeing across Europe — taking care to avoid countries that had extradition treaties with China.
The fraudster used brokers to convert bitcoin, loading some of the funds on to prepaid cards. In Zurich, she bought two watches for about £120,000.
She later returned to the UK and stayed for two weeks at a hide-out on the shores of Loch Tay in the Scottish Highlands, before moving to an Airbnb rental on the outskirts of Glasgow. The stays were arranged by Ling, whom prosecutors said Qian met in 2019.
Qian was finally arrested in April 2024 after police traced her to York. She was found with two false passports and a “large quantity” of cash.
The bitcoin was worth more than £300mn when, in 2018, officers seized several devices containing it from a filing cabinet in Qian’s Hampstead bedroom and from a safe-deposit box in St John’s Wood.
The haul is currently valued at about £5bn after a surge in bitcoin prices.
The crypto fortune is being fought over in separate civil proceedings at the High Court between UK authorities and thousands of Chinese investors who were cheated and contend that the British state should not benefit.
Victims of the Ponzi scheme suffered financial ruin and “marriages and families were destroyed”, Gillian Jones KC, for the prosecution, told Southwark Crown Court.
Returns to investors were paid out of others’ deposits. “It was a Ponzi scheme,” Jones said. “The contracts they had entered into were simply not worth the paper they were written on.”
Qian, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty in September to one charge of possessing, and one charge of transferring, criminal property, namely cryptocurrency, under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
Representing Qian, Roger Sahota of law firm Berkeley Square Solicitors said after the sentencing that she “accepts her conviction and the mistakes that led to it. She never set out to commit fraud but recognises her investment schemes were fraudulent and misled those who trusted her. She is deeply sorry for the distress suffered by investors.”
Ling, of Matlock, Derbyshire, pleaded guilty to entering into a money-laundering arrangement.
Additional reporting by Mari Novik