A crypto fugitive who orchestrated a multibillion-pound Ponzi scheme to defraud investors in China before she fled the country on a moped and made her way to London has been jailed in the most valuable money-laundering case ever heard in the UK.
Zhimin Qian, 47, was sentenced to 11 years and eight months on Tuesday at Southwark Crown Court after an investigation in which London’s Metropolitan Police seized a bitcoin fortune now valued at about £5bn.
Prosecutors said that between 2014 and 2017, the Chinese national defrauded more than 128,000 victims — many of whom lost their life savings — out of £4.6bn in total, before converting a chunk of the proceeds into bitcoin.