A woman accused of running a multibillion-pound investment fraud in China has pleaded guilty in London to laundering bitcoin linked to the scheme, the Financial Times reported.
Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, entered her pleas via an interpreter at Southwark Crown Court on what had been slated as the first day of trial. She will be sentenced at a later date, according to the FT.
Qian first drew UK law-enforcement attention during a 2018 Metropolitan Police raid on a Hampstead mansion, where officers seized devices later found to contain 61,000 bitcoins, one of the largest crypto-hauls by any police force and worth more than £5bn at today’s prices, the newspaper said.
According to UK court documents cited by the FT, Qian previously ran a Chinese company, Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology, launched in 2014, that sold investment products with promised returns of up to 300% and claimed a sideline in bitcoin mining.
UK authorities say she ultimately funneled investor money to a crypto exchange, converted it into bitcoin, and fled China in July 2017 as a domestic investigation began, using various identities to evade detection. Police scrutiny of an aborted property purchase by Qian’s assistant, Jian Wen, since helped unravel the case, the FT reported.
Qian’s lawyer previously claimed she fled China in 2017 amid a government “crackdown on successful crypto entrepreneurs,” fearing unjust arrest and asset seizure, the FT noted.
Read more at the Financial Times