Zhimin Qian, also known as the 'Bitcoin Queen,' has been handed an 11-year, 8-month prison sentence by a London judge after she pleaded guilty to charges of possession of and transacting in criminal property in August of this year. According to Bloomberg, Qian ran an unlicensed investment company in China from 2014 to 2017, which duped around 128,000 investors out of US$5.6 billion. She has been on the run since 2017 after Chinese police raided a company event, travelling throughout Southeast Asia on a fake passport, before settling in the UK.
Her downfall began in 2018 when a city law firm rang alarm bells as Qian and her associates attempted to purchase London properties using Bitcoin. This led to the police scrutinizing their moves, resulting in the seizure of 61,000 Bitcoin — the largest forfeiture in cryptocurrency history, currently worth over US$6 billion, until the U.S. broke the record by confiscating over 127,000 Bitcoin tokens from the Prince Group. When she transferred 8.2 Bitcoin in February 2024 into a wallet monitored by the authorities as part of their investigation into Jian Wen, a fast-food worker who helped Qian launder her funds and was arrested in 2022, that was when they located the Bitcoin Queen, leading to her arrest in York.
