Cryptoqueen who fled China for London mansion to be sentenced over £5bn Bitcoin stash

A woman who police say bought cryptocurrency now worth billions of pounds using money stolen from thousands of Chinese pensioners is set to be sentenced this week for money laundering.

After fleeing China, she moved into a mansion in Hampstead, north London. It was raided by the Metropolitan Police a year later and made one of the largest cryptocurrency seizures in the world.

More than 100,000 Chinese have invested their money in her company, which claimed to be developing high-tech health products and mining cryptocurrency. Police say she actually embezzled the money. While awaiting the ruling, investors told the BBC they hope to recover at least some of their money from the UK authorities.

Anything left unclaimed usually defaults to the UK government – ​​leading some to speculate that the Treasury could tap into the money.

“If we can put all the evidence together, we hope the UK government, the Crown Prosecution Service and the High Court will be able to show compassion,” said one of the victims we are contacting Mr Yeo, who says his marriage failed as a result of the fraud. “Because now, there is only that amount of Bitcoin [cryptocurrency] “It can give us back a little of what we lost.”

Qian Zemin, 47, arrived in the UK on a fake passport in September 2017, after The Chinese police began investigating her.

She moved into a mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath, with a rent of more than £17,000 ($22,700) a month. To pay this amount, she needed to convert her Bitcoin stash into money she could spend.

So, she pretended to be a wealthy antiques and diamond heiress, hired a former deli worker as her personal assistant, and asked him to exchange cryptocurrency for other assets, such as cash and property.

As the value of Bitcoin rose, Qian was able to achieve what her company promised its investors – that they could “get rich while lying down.” Her assistant Wen Jian said – at her trial last year, which culminated in a six-year prison sentence for money laundering – that Qian spent most of her days lying in bed, playing games and shopping online.

But Qian was also drawing up a bold six-year plan for future plans, according to her memoirs. Her notes detail plans to found an international bank, buy a Swedish castle, and even cozy up to a British duke.

Her biggest stated goal is to become queen of Liberland, a small unrecognized state on the Croatian-Serbian border, by 2022.

Meanwhile, Qian asked Wen to look for houses she could buy in London. But her attempts to buy a particularly large property on Totteridge Common – an area known for its large, secluded residences – led to a police investigation when Wynn was unable to determine her boss’s wealth.

Police raided Qian’s Hampstead rental property and discovered hard drives and laptops found loaded with tens of thousands of bitcoins – believed to be the largest cryptocurrency seizure in UK history.

Qian had established the company through which the funds were embezzled just four years earlier, in her native China. Lantian Jirui, or Bluesky Greet in English, claimed to be using investors’ money to mine – or generate – new Bitcoin, investing in a range of ground-breaking technological devices.

But UK police believe this was an elaborate scam, and that Qian’s company was simply using promises of high profits to lure more and more investors into the scheme.

Joe Ryan, of the Metropolitan Police, told the BBC: “The more information we got about her involvement… that she was in fact the ringleader of the scam, and not just a member of the underclass… it became clear that yes, she was very intelligent, very driven, very manipulative, able to convince a lot of people.”

One of her investmentspMr Yu says he never suspected anything was wrong because the company was drip-feeding him a portion of his apparent profits – just over 100 yuan ($14, £10) – every day.

“It made everyone feel really comfortable and even gave us the confidence to borrow more money to invest in the company,” he says.

He and his wife had initially invested 60,000 yuan ($8,429, £6,295) each. They were told, he says, that they would make a 200% profit over two and a half years. They soon obtained loans worth thousands of pounds at interest rates of up to 8%, in order to invest more.

In addition, Mr. Yu reinvested his daily payments into the company as soon as he received them.

“There was no rule that said you had to reinvest your profits, but I think we were too weak to resist. They inflated our dreams… until we lost all self-control, all critical judgment.”

Investors saw their daily payments accrued for each new person they signed up. This helped the scam reach about 120,000 people, in every province of China, according to documents from experiments conducted by the company’s official promoters in China. Their deposits totaled more than 40 billion yuan ($5.6 billion, £4.2 billion), the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) found.

A former employee of the company later testified that it was the new investors’ money that was funding the daily payments, not cryptocurrency mining profits.

Lantian Gerui’s marketing exploited the loneliness of many middle-aged and elderly Chinese. Qian wrote poems about social responsibility, with lines such as: “We should love the elderly through the infatuation of first romance.”

The company also organized group holidays and banquets for existing and potential investors. They were used to promote more investment opportunities – slide shows and off-the-shelf card machines.

Lantian Jirui also declared her love for China as a nation, another ploy designed to appeal to the elderly.

“Our patriotism was our weakness, and that’s what they exploited,” says Yu, who is in his 60s. “They said they wanted to make China number one in the world.”

Mr Yu said a range of speakers endorsed the company, including the son-in-law of the late Chairman Mao, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China.

“All of us in our generation look up to Chairman Mao, so if even his son-in-law guarantees it, how can we not trust him?”

The company even held an event at the Great Hall of the People, where China’s legislature meets, according to an investor who attended the event and two others we spoke to.

“That group of [promoters]“They’ll take something red and convince you it’s white, and they’ll take something black and convince you it’s red,” Mr. Yu says.

Despite leading this high-profile project, Qian was notoriously secretive, known only as Huahua or Little Flower to her clients, communicating with them largely through poems she posted on her blog.

But she will show up to major investors – those who have invested at least six million yuan ($842,000, £628,000) – and invite them to more intimate events, according to one such client, Mr Li.

“Those of us in attendance could tell we were starstruck,” he recalls. “We all saw her as our goddess of wealth.

“She began to encourage us to achieve big dreams…that within three years she would give us enough wealth to feed our families for three generations.”

Li, his wife and his brother invested about 10 million yuan ($1.3 million, £1 million) between them.

The Chinese police investigation into the Lantian Jirui case, which began in mid-2017, marked the beginning of the end for Qian’s scheme.

“The payments suddenly stopped,” Yu recalls. “The company said the police are conducting some checks… although we have been promised that payments will resume soon.”

He says what initially helped investors keep calm was reassuring company managers that this was just a temporary mistake, and urging them not to call the police.

He says what he later discovered through Chinese court cases was that Qian paid off top managers to allay investors’ fears – while she fled with the money to the UK.

Qian was not completely oblivious to her investors’ plight – she outlined a plan in her diary to pay off her debts in China, once the price of Bitcoin reached £50,000 per coin. But her memoirs make it clear that her priority was to govern and develop Liberland, and she allocated millions of pounds to this project.

When she was finally arrested in York, northern England, last April, police also found four other people in the house, Southwark Crown Court heard at the start of her sentencing hearing on Monday. All four were brought to the UK specifically to work for Qian in roles such as shopping, cleaning and security, and were employed illegally, the court was told.

At the time of her arrest, Qian denied all charges, claiming that she was simply fleeing the Chinese government’s crackdown on cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, and refuted evidence provided by Chinese police. But then, at her trial in September, she unexpectedly pleaded guilty to illegally obtaining and possessing cryptocurrency.

This gives victims “a glimpse of sunlight,” Lee told the BBC.

The value of the cryptocurrency Qian brought to the UK has increased more than 20-fold since her arrival. Her fate will be decided by A Civil “proceeds of crime” case Which will begin in earnest early next year.

Thousands of Chinese investors plan to file a claim in the case, say lawyers from two firms representing the victims. But this won’t be easy, one of them, a Chinese lawyer who asked to remain anonymous, told us. They will have to prove their claim – and in many cases they transferred the money not directly to Qian, but to the accounts of local promoters who then passed the cash up the chain.

It is not clear whether victims, if successful, will receive only their original investment, or an inflated amount that reflects the subsequent rise in Bitcoin’s value.

As in other “proceeds of crime” cases, any money remaining after this process will usually go to the UK government. The BBC asked the British Treasury what it planned to do with any remaining funds, but it did not respond.

Separately, last month, prosecutors said they were considering a compensation plan for those who do not have representation in the civil case. We asked CPS what level of evidence this alternative scheme would require, but it told us it is unable to share any details at this stage.

He told the BBC that the damage to Mr Yeo – with whom his wife invested – was not just financial, but personal, culminating in a divorce and lack of contact with his son.

However, he considers himself relatively lucky. One lawyer we spoke to said many Qian investors were left without money to buy food or medicine.

Yu knew one of these people, from Tianjin, northern China. He added that she died of breast cancer after leaving the hospital because she was unable to afford the costs of treatment.

“She was on death’s doorstep, and she knew I could write, so she asked me to write an elegy for her if the worst came to the worst.”

Mr Yeo says he kept his word and wrote a poem in her memory and posted it online. It ends with the lines:

“Let us be pillars, holding up the sky / Instead of being sheep, led and led astray / To those who remain alive – work harder / So we can right this gross injustice.”