A 47-year-old Chinese woman, Ximin Qian, alias Yadi Zhang, was found guilty in a London court in the largest cryptocurrency scam ever. The woman confessed before Southwark Crown Court that she had illegally obtained 61,000 bitcoins. These bitcoins are worth $6.7 billion. The case was solved by the Metropolitan Police after five years of hard work.
According to Canadian police, Qian duped 128,000 people in China between 2014 and 2017 and made them invest large amounts of money. Qian had transferred the embezzled money into Bitcoin to hide its origin. Police began investigating the case in 2018 after receiving information about the mysterious transfer of crypto assets. Qian had fled China using forged documents and entered the UK, where he tried to launder the money by buying luxury properties.
Qian’s accomplice Jian Wen had previously been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for helping to launder the stolen crypto coins. Wen rented a luxury villa in North London. He also bought two properties in Dubai. Zimin had been on the run from the police for five years. Wen bought her properties but could not give a satisfactory answer as to where the money came from. Police seized crypto assets worth 300 million pounds from Zimin.
Zimin fled to Britain in September 2018. She was caught trying to convert the money she had obtained through the scam into Bitcoins.
