SINGAPORE: Qian Zhimin needed a glamorous way of life. She travelled throughout Europe, yearned to be acquainted with royalty and even dreamed of turning into the ruler of a self-proclaimed micronation.
After dishonest hundreds out of their life financial savings, she transformed her ill-gotten beneficial properties into cryptocurrency and, for years, evaded seize throughout Europe beneath false identities.
However her double life got here crashing down in 2024 when police traced digital clues that led them straight to her residence within the northern English metropolis of York.
On Tuesday (Nov 11), a UK courtroom sentenced the 47-year-old Chinese language nationwide to 11 years and eight months in jail for cash laundering.
This is how Qian spun her internet of lies, how she got here to own 61,000 bitcoins – presently value £5 billion (US$6.6 billion) – and the way the legislation lastly caught up together with her.
INVESTMENT FRAUD
Qian’s prison empire started in China, the place she and several other Chinese language accomplices launched a Ponzi scheme by means of an organization known as Lantian Gerui in 2014. Traders have been promised returns of as much as 300 per cent.
Between 2014 and 2017, an estimated 128,000 folks handed over £4.6 billion, comprising life financial savings and pensions.
In keeping with courtroom paperwork, whereas some funds have been returned to keep up the facade, a sizeable quantity was siphoned off by Qian and her co-conspirators, lots of whom have been prosecuted and convicted in China. She transformed round £20.2 million of the funds into money, jewelry and bitcoin.
In 2014, utilizing the title of one in every of her associates, Qian opened an account on the Huobi cryptocurrency trade in China and transferred investor funds into that account in trade for bitcoin. Further investor monies have been used to purchase bitcoin in over-the-counter transactions.
By the point the Chinese language police started investigating, greater than 70,000 bitcoins had been transferred right into a cryptocurrency pockets on a laptop computer.
