When British police seized 61,000 bitcoin from Qian Zhimin – a Chinese conwoman on the run – they hailed it as the largest seizure of cryptocurrency ever. Now a legal battle is intensifying over the haul which, at current prices, is worth around £3.2 billion. After the self-described “Goddess of Wealth” was jailed for 11 years for money laundering in the autumn, the chancellor reportedly “earmarked” most of the stash “to shore up the government's finances”, says The Times.
Many of Qian Zhimin's 128,000 Chinese victims are crying foul, however. They insist the compensation scheme proposed by the UK is inadequate because it fails to capture the massive rise in the value of bitcoin, which has more than quintupled since the fraud unravelled – and are fighting to stop the British state from benefiting, says the Financial Times. Prosecutors say litigation firms representing the victims are merely trying “to cash in”.
It is a fittingly messy climax to a long-running saga that has drawn a good deal of attention in China, where Qian Zhimin is viewed as a “super-villain”, says the South China Morning Post. By the time Chinese police busted her massive pyramid scheme, which ran from 2014 to 2017, she is reckoned to have conned investors, many elderly, out of more than 40 billion yuan (around £4.4 billion). Qian Zhimin dangled returns of up to 300% for investing in Tianjin Blue Sky Grid Electronic Technology, which claimed to offer everything from bitcoin mining to air purifiers, says The Economist. “In fact, the firm's funds mainly came from depositors who, in typical Ponzi fashion, were offered rewards to recruit others.” Qian Zhimin appears to have had a mesmerising effect on victims, who were lured to conferences at luxury hotels across China. She tapped into her audience's patriotism and skilfully manipulated their generational gripes.
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Little is known about Qian Zhimin's early life, beyond the fact that she was born in 1978. But her extraordinary trajectory and grandiose schemes hint at an unscrupulous personality with fantasist tendencies. You can't fault her derring-do. When the balloon went up in 2017, Qian Zhimin fled China on a moped to Myanmar, having smuggled out her bitcoin stash, says The Guardian. She fetched up in Britain under the alias “Yadi Zhang”. It was the start of an extravagant seven years on the run. Qian Zhimin rented a mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath, posing as a wealthy antiques and diamond heiress, and hiring a “personal assistant” to help launder the crypto into cash and property. Qian Zhimin herself “spent most of her days lying in bed, gaming and online shopping”, while drawing up bold schemes to secure her freedom. She planned to found an international bank, buy a Swedish castle and ingratiate herself to a British duke. But the grandest scheme was to make herself queen of Liberland – an unrecognised microstate on the Croatian-Serbian border – which she would run as a bitcoin fiefdom, believing it would entitle her to immunity from prosecution, says the BBC. A budget of £5 million was set aside for a set of crown jewels.
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Crypto worth £67 million found in Qian Zhimin's London property
The dragnet started closing in when police were alerted to her assistant's attempt to buy a £24 million London property. A raid revealed hard drives and laptops loaded with tens of thousands of bitcoin. Qian Zhimin vanished the day before she was due to be interviewed in September 2020. It would be four years before she was finally caught after police noticed that a bitcoin wallet they were monitoring had been accessed by a Malaysian-born businessman whom Qian Zhimin had recruited as her “butler”, says The Times. They followed him to a house in York. When Qian Zhimin was arrested, a memory stick “in a secret pocket of her jogging bottoms” was found to contain the codes for £67 million of bitcoin. Given half a chance, she was ready to make a run for it.
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