Chinese national Zhimin Qian has been convicted of illegally acquiring and possessing 61,000 BTC after five years of allegedly ‘evading justice.’ The woman has been known as the goddess of wealth in China due to her crypto-related schemes.
Summary
- Chinese national Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, pleaded guilty to illegally acquiring and possessing 61,000 BTC tied to a massive fraud in China.
- UK authorities seized the Bitcoins, worth $6.9 billion today, in what they call the world’s largest BTC seizure.
According to a recent BBC report, Zhimin Qian recently pleaded guilty to charges of illegally acquiring and possessing up to 61,000 Bitcoins (BTC) that were seized from Qian just last year. Authorities believe the 47-year-old woman may have had a key role in one of the largest money laundering schemes in history.
Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, 45, has been accused of orchestrating a large-scale fraud in China between 2014 and 2017 that cheated more than 128,000 victims out of their funds. The stolen funds were later stored by Qian in heaps of BTC, amounting in what was dubbed by authorities as “the world’s largest BTC seizure” which is worth nearly $7 billion at current prices.
“Today’s guilty plea marks the culmination of years of dedicated investigation by the Met’s Economic Crime teams and our partners,” said Will Lyne, Head of Economic Cybercrime Command at the Metropolitan Police as quoted by the media.
Other media reports say that Zhimin Qian had ambitions of wanting to be known as a “goddess of wealth” and even had plans to build her own kingdom. Her stolen BTC trove has even exceeded the holdings of BTC treasury companies such as MARA Holdings, XXI, and Japan’s Metaplanet.
How did Zhimin Qian evade authorities?
From 2014 to 2017, Qian ran a Chinese company called Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology which promised investors returns of up to 300%. However, instead of actually investing their funds into legitimate financial products, Qian’s firm simply injected the money into cryptocurrency.
The investors, aged mostly between 50 to 75 years old, had reportedly invested “hundreds of thousands to tens of millions” of yuan into investments promoted by Qian. The scheme relied on the increasing popularity of digital assets in China at the time, promising high dividends and guaranteed profit.
With Chinese authorities already on her tail, Qian fled China and came to the U.K using false documents in September 2017. Authorities state that she was working with an accomplice named a Jian Wen, who was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison last year for her role in the scheme.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service, Wen helped Qian launder the fraud’s proceeds, going from living above a restaurant to renting a multi-million-pound home in North London. Additionally, Qian and Wen also used the stolen funds to buy two properties in Dubai more than £500,000.
Wen insisted the properties were bought on behalf of a Chinese employer, but prosecutors argued that the scale of her bitcoin holdings and the absence of a legitimate paper trail pointed to criminal origins.
U.K authorities made a breakthrough in the case in 2018 after they received a tip-off about the transfer of criminal assets. Within that same year, the police raided Zhimin Qian’s home and found digital wallets containing 61,000 BTC.
Back in October 2024, Zhimin Qian had previously denied charges of money laundering and had plans to contest the charges. A co-defendant, Seng Hok Ling, also pleaded not guilty to related charges.
At the moment, Qian is being held in custody ahead of her sentencing, which has yet to have a fixed date. So far, the Crown Prosecution Service claimed that many of the victims have received some of their money back via a compensation scheme established by Chinese authorities.
