The trail had been cold for five years – ever since Zhimin Qian narrowly escaped the police days after they raided her six-bedroom house in London. Then, in February 2024, detectives noticed a long-dormant bitcoin wallet flicker to life, and a manhunt began.
For over a month, police tracked the mastermind of one of the UK’s largest money-laundering cases – from a lonely bungalow on the shores of Loch Tay to a red-tiled house outside Glasgow, and finally to a quiet Airbnb in suburban York, where the 46-year-old was arrested in late April alongside four Malaysian nationals working illegally as her domestic staff.
On Tuesday Qian was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in prison, alongside her associate, Malaysian national Seng Hok Ling, who received four years and 11 months. The bitcoin seized from her London home – more than 61,000 of them, worth billions of pounds – is now the subject of civil proceedings to determine what will be returned to victims in China.
“The scale of your money laundering is unprecedented. Your motive was one of pure greed,” Judge Sally-Ann Hales KC told Qian at Southwark crown court on Tuesday.
“Bitcoin pioneer Ms Qian, once the world’s largest female BTC holder, accepts her conviction and the mistakes that led to it,” said Qian’s lawyer, Roger Sahota.
“She never set out to commit fraud but recognises her investment schemes were fraudulent … She is deeply sorry for the distress suffered by investors.”
When Qian and Ling were convicted in September, the value of the bitcoin was priced at more than £5.5bn, according to Metropolitan police officers. It is understood that the value is constantly changing, and is currently priced at about £5bn. It has been described as the UK’s largest cryptocurrency seizure.
Qian’s sentence caps a decade-long criminal career spanning continents. She first appeared on the radar of Chinese authorities in 2012, linked to smaller pyramid schemes in Anhui and Jilin provinces. Then, in her early 30s, she was investigated but never convicted.
Soon after, she launched a bigger scam: a vast crypto investment scheme run through a Tianjin-based company called “Blue Sky”, purportedly dealing in electronics. Already on the run, Qian operated in the shadows and was known to her staff as “sister Hua”. She lured victims with glossy promotional videos and promises of massive returns – a clip called Britain Nice Life featured sweeping shots of London.
Those were the early days of crypto, and scams were proliferating in China and worldwide. “The investment opportunity at the time might have seemed relatively realistic given the crypto environment, but it had devastating effects for everyone involved,” said DS Isabella Grotto, who led the investigation into Qian.
Qian defrauded more than 128,000 victims across China. Families pooled their savings and lost everything. “I was forced to sell my house. Now I have no fixed abode,” wrote one victim in a testimonial to the Metropolitan police.
Another wrote: “My wife divorced me. I was mentally broken.”
By the time Qian fled China in July 2017, travelling overland on a moped to Myanmar, she is estimated to have swindled 40bn yuan – roughly £4.3bn – most of which she converted into bitcoin. She first arrived in the UK from Malaysia in the autumn of 2017, carrying a St Kitts and Nevis passport under the alias “Yadi Zhang”.
This was the start of nearly seven years on the run. Qian spent almost £92,000 on designer jewellery and women’s clothing at Harrods. She travelled through Europe, staying at the Ritz Carlton in Berlin and visiting Stockholm, Copenhagen and Kutná Hora. In her diaries, she dreamed about meeting a European duke, or using her money to become the ruler of Liberland, a microstate on a disputed floodplain between Croatia and Serbia.
But the fear of Chinese authorities was constant. Qian avoided travelling to countries that have extradition treaties with China. Later, she forbade her domestic staff from using devices made by Huawei or Xiaomi. (The four people found with her had been made to sign contracts with fines of up to £10,000 if they revealed information about her or “family members”.)
With her associates – Jian Wen, a former takeaway worker sentenced to six years and eight months, and Ling – Qian strategised on how to turn her bitcoin into assets. They attempted to buy homes in the UK and Italy before successfully buying two properties in Dubai in 2019.
That drew the attention of UK police: in 2018, Wen attempted to buy a £24m London property, triggering a suspicious activity report. From there, the dragnet started to close. Police raided their rental house, then a safety deposit box containing laptops and crypto wallets containing the bitcoin in November 2018.
When Qian was finally found in York in April, she was carrying more than £60m across four additional crypto wallets, plus false passports and cash. She pleaded guilty to fraud charges on the first day of her trial in September.
But the years before she was apprehended were full of close scrapes and retail therapy. While Ling, her facilitator, nervously Googled “How much is considered money laundering in Malaysia,” and “What are the sentences for money laundering in the UK,” Qian continued to spend.
“See you in jewellery street,” she wrote to Wen after asking her to arrange the conversion of four bitcoins into cash one day in 2018. “Obsessed with jewellery,” wrote Wen.
Will Lyne, the head of economic and cybercrime at the Metropolitan police, said: “Many people lost their life savings, and the emotional and financial impact was devastating. Today’s outcome is a step towards justice for those victims.
“Money laundering enables and supports serious criminality across our communities, and organised crime groups increasingly use cryptocurrency to move, hide, and invest the proceeds of serious crime.
“Developments in technology are exploited by criminals, but also provide opportunities for those seeking to stop them. Every cryptocurrency transaction leaves a trace.”
