The Crypto-Queen
Written by Max Baines
Backstory
On 29 September 2025, Zhimin Qian, a Chinese national, pleaded guilty to two counts of money laundering at Southwark Crown Court. On 11 November 2025, Ms Qian was sentenced to 11 years and 8 months’ custody, reflecting the largest ever seizure of cryptocurrency in the UK, worth around £4-5 billion at the time of sentence.
The story starts in 2014, in the Tianjin province of China. In March of that year, Ms Qian, then 36 years old, set up Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology Ltd. – “Blue Sky” in English. The company recruited salespeople across China to promote a range of investment products, each promising swift and significant returns to investors. Ms Qian herself cut an enigmatic figure: she appeared only occasionally at promotional events; her face covered, she was wheelchair-bound and used the alias “Hua Hua”, her real identity not known even to those who worked alongside her at Lantian Gerui.
By 2017, over 128,000 individuals had invested across the country, totalling over 40 billion Renminbi (around £4.6bn), many parting with their life savings. As Chinese law enforcement closed in, Zhimin Qian fled China on 26 July, crossing by night into neighbouring Myanmar before flying onto Thailand, Laos and Malaysia on a series of false passports, finally landing in London on 16 September 2017 under the new identity of Yadi Zhang.
As a fugitive from China, Ms Qian (now living as Ms Zhang) set up a new life in the UK. She employed a personal assistant, Jian Wen, who was swiftly directed to fly to Bangkok in October 2017 to recover a laptop. This laptop contained a digital wallet that held around 61,000 Bitcoin, which Ms Qian had obtained using the stolen investor funds.
Laundering the Bitcoin
Once back in London, Ms Qian and Ms Wen set about spending, converting and realising the vast quantity of cryptocurrency. They rented a high-end property in West Hampstead before, in early 2018, travelling extensively together across Europe. Swapping Bitcoin for bags of cash or money transfers, they stayed in luxury hotels and purchased expensive jewellery for Ms Qian, enjoying the fruits of the stolen Bitcoin without detection.
While Ms Qian continued her European vacation, Ms Wen was tasked with finding high-value properties in London to purchase with Bitcoin. Ms Qian and Ms Wen were assisted in their endeavours by various “facilitators” – individuals and companies purporting to offer legitimate wealth management services to high-net-worth individuals: handling property transactions, introducing investment opportunities and generally assisting in keeping their clients’ wealth and profile invisible.
Arrest & Seizure
In late 2017, Ms Qian engaged conveyancing lawyers to conduct the purchases, making offers on London properties worth £23.5m and £12.5m. Highly unusually, the deposit would be paid wholly in Bitcoin, with conversion to Sterling conducted via an unregulated intermediary (who stole £1m in the process). Not satisfied with the changing explanations regarding the source of the crypto, the lawyers ultimately refused to proceed with the transaction, and a police investigation was commenced.
In late October 2018, Met officers conducted an initial search of the townhouse where Ms Qian and Ms Wen were residing, seizing bundles of cash and a handful of digital devices. During the search, a handwritten sketch was found indicating the location of a safe deposit box housing further devices. Over the following months and years, police uncovered crypto wallets on the devices and, through a painstaking process of piecing together passphrases and seed (recovery) words from notebooks and scraps of paper found at the property, they gained access to some of the key wallets. With the assistance of a third-party custodian, many thousands of seized Bitcoin were transferred to wallets under police control (thousands more had been moved on or could never be located).
By the time police returned to the property in August 2020, Ms Qian had disappeared, seemingly without a trace. In the meantime, the Chinese police had arrested around 80 of her associates back in China, with many receiving prison sentences for their involvement in the Ponzi scheme or for their role in assisting Ms Qian’s flight to the UK.
Jian Wen was prosecuted and convicted on one count of money laundering in March 2024. During Ms Wen’s trial, police noticed activity on one of the crypto wallets attributed to Ms Qian, which had long since been dormant. A series of transactions had been conducted through the Binance crypto exchange. Crypto exchanges are required to conduct a level of KYC and account details were provided by the Binance exchange for a Mr Seng Hok Ling. This included IP data from the access logs for the account, which linked to an address in Derbyshire. Ultimately, officers were led to an Airbnb apartment in York on 22 April 2024, where Ms Qian was finally arrested together with Mr Ling, some six and a half years after she had entered the UK as a fugitive from China.
Challenges & Lessons
The asset tracing exercise conducted by the Met, cybercrime specialists and a crypto expert was vast, complex and hugely time-consuming. While Blockchain technology offers an immutable record of transactions, the identity of those who sit behind the addresses and transfers remain anonymous, the source and destination of each transaction represented by an alphanumeric sequence, with crypto able to move seamlessly across borders and continents without detection. Many crypto exchanges used by UK customers are based overseas or offshore, and law enforcement relies on compliance with International Letters of Request.
New legislation, in the form of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Order 2025, is set to be introduced, which will bring cryptoassets into line with traditional assets: any firm or exchange which manages crypto will be required to meet the same standards in terms of transparency, money laundering measures and consumer protection which apply to traditional assets. These entities will require FCA-authorisation to deal in crypto, including where based overseas but dealing with a UK customer.
Where law enforcement has neither a wallet passphrase nor the seed (recovery) words access to criminal property can be near impossible. In these instances, suspects are increasingly subject to a s.49 RIPA Notice, requiring disclosure of a/the access code. Deliberate refusal carries a prison sentence (two or five years under s.53 RIPA 2000, depending on whether a risk to national security is engaged), and suspects should expect charges to follow by way of further pressure to cooperate.
Law enforcement in crypto cases must also contend, in high value cases, with the question of whether to apply to convert the seized crypto into fiat currency (further to the new power under s.303Z55 of POCA 2002), thus protecting its value at the point of seizure, or retain the asset in its native form, leaving its value open to market forces and potentially huge swings in value given the inherent volatility of crypto. In deciding whether to make an order under this section, a court must evaluate the likelihood of the cryptoassets suffering a significant loss in value before the future date of forfeiture (s. 303Z55(4)). The market's unpredictability will surely make any such assessment highly subjective and uncertain.
Afterlife
In a case packed with unusual and novel features, perhaps the standout is the ongoing battle over the final destination of the highly valuable cryptoassets seized. There remain competing interests, from the Chinese state, individual Chinese investors, and the UK Exchequer. The DPP has commenced civil proceedings under Part 5 of POCA and established a special compensation fund for victims, the first of its kind, issuing a Notice to Victims (on its website) which allows time for any individual or group claimants to seek advice and make an application under s.281 of POCA such that monies properly due to victims can be ringfenced and declared to be “not recoverable”.
For a victim to succeed under s.281, they must demonstrate (to the civil standard) that the property in question “belongs to him”, that they were deprived of it by unlawful conduct and deprived of it at a time when it was not recoverable property. The requirement for a victim to apply to the court and show a proprietary interest contrasts with court’s power to make a compensation order (under ss. 133 to 135 of the Sentencing Act 2020), where a court may simply make an order of its own motion in a sum it deems appropriate if it considers an individual has suffered personal injury, loss or damage resulting from an offence.
Together with a compensation scheme established in China during its own investigation, the hope is that funds are directed back to legitimate victims, to provide some reparation to individuals and families whose lives were torn apart by Zhimin Qian.
Written by Max Baines