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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 the UK has been jailed for 11 years and eight months.
Zhimin Qian, 47, was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court in London on Tuesday following what London’s Metropolitan Police said was the UK’s highest-value money laundering case. Her Malaysian assistant, Seng Hok Ling, also 47, received a sentence of four years and 11 months.
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.
At a sentencing hearing, the court heard that after coming to the attention of authorities in China, 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 pre-paid 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.
Police traced her to York, where she was finally arrested in April 2024.
Scotland Yard said it was among the most complex economic crime investigations it had ever undertaken.
Officers said the bitcoin confiscated as part of the investigation was the world’s largest confirmed cryptocurrency seizure by law enforcement.
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. At the time, bitcoin was priced at about £5,300 apiece.
But it has since surged in value to almost £80,000 apiece, giving the haul a total value today of about £5bn
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 at the start of her trial in September to one charge of possessing, and one charge of transferring, criminal property, namely cryptocurrency, under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
Seng Hok Ling, of Matlock, Derbyshire, pleaded guilty to entering into a money-laundering arrangement.
Additional reporting by Mari Novik
