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New Delhi: Qian Zhimin, a woman accused of buying cryptocurrency now worth billions of pounds using funds stolen from thousands of Chinese pensioners has been sentenced to 11 years and eight months for money laundering in the UK. Passing sentence at Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday, Judge Sally-Ann Hales told Qian Zhimin that she was "the architect of this offending from its inception to its conclusion... your motive was one of pure greed".
One of the biggest cryptocurrency fraudsters has finally been caught in the UK. More than 100,000 Chinese people invested their money in her company which claimed to be developing high-tech health products and mining cryptocurrency. As the police eventually found out, she was in effect only embezzling their funds.
Qian Zhimin, also known as the ‘Goddess of Wealth’, arrived in the UK under a fake passport in 2017 after Chinese police started investigating her company’s doings. She then moved into a mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath, the rent for which she procured by liquidating her Bitcoin stash.
To attain this, she posed as a wealthy antiques and diamond heiress. Zhimin’s time in the UK was one of intrigue and drama, as he then proceeded to hire a former takeaway worker as her personal assistant who was tasked with trade the cryptocurrency into assets like cash and property.
UK’s Metropolitan Police raided her Hampstead mansion last year, making one of the world's largest cryptocurrency seizures. Investigation revealed several interesting plans that Qian was drawing up. According to her diary, the cryptoqueen had plans to buy an international bank and a Swedish castle. It was revealed that she even wished to intricate herself with members of the British Royalty.
Another novel idea of hers was to become queen of Liberland, an unrecognised microstate on the Croatian-Serbian border. While her plans were grand, their execution reportedly was not. As per her assistant Wen Jian during her trial last year, she said that Qian spent most of her days lying in bed, gaming and online shopping.
The company through which Qian embezzled funds was set up four years ago in China. It was called ‘Lantian Gerui’ (Bluesky Greet in English). The company claimed to use investors' money to mine new Bitcoin. The money developed, it stated, would then be used to invest in upcoming, new-age technological devices.
In reality, Qian's company was simply using promises of high profits to pull more and more investors into the scheme. "The more information we got about her involvement… that she was actually the leader of the fraud, not just a lower down member… it became obvious that yes she's very clever, she's very switched on, very manipulative, able to persuade a lot of people," Det Con Joe Ryan from the Met told the BBC.
According to documents from the company's trials in China, with time the scam grew in proportion, reaching some 120,000 people. Their deposits reportedly totalled more than 40bn yuan or $5.6bn. While her profit stack grew, Qian was notoriously secretive when she operated in China. She was known only as Huahua or Little Flower to her clients and communicated largely through the poems she posted on her blog. After Chinese agencies opened investigations against her in her home country, it was when she moved to the UK, where her masquerade finally dropped. Her fate, and that of her crypto stash, will be decided by a civil "proceeds of crime" case that will start early next year.
