How Chinese takeaway employee led police to Bitcoin price £3bn in Britain’s largest ever cryptocurrency seizure

Within weeks of Yadi Zhang’s arrival in London in September 2017, Jian Wen had left her job and room in a Chinese takeaway and moved right into a £5m six-bedroom home close to Hampstead Heath.

The girls, who claimed to run a world jewelry enterprise buying and selling in diamonds and antiques in nations together with Japan, Thailand and China, travelled the world and spent tens of hundreds of kilos on designer garments and sneakers in Harrods.

In her newly prosperous way of life, Wen purchased a £25,000 E-Class Mercedes and despatched her son to the £6,000-a-term Heathside preparatory college.

But alarm bells rang when she tried to purchase a few of London’s costliest properties, together with a £23.5m seven-bedroom Hampstead mansion with a swimming pool and a close-by £12.5m house with a cinema and health club.

Wen, who had declared earnings of simply £5,979 within the 2016/17 monetary yr, couldn’t clarify the supply of the Bitcoin she would use to pay for the properties and police first raided the ladies’s house on 31 October 2018.

But it could be one other two-and-a-half years earlier than investigators realised that they had made the UK’s biggest-ever cryptocurrency seizure when greater than 61,000 Bitcoin have been found in digital wallets.

The cryptocurrency was price £1.4bn on the time however its worth has now risen to greater than £3bn, whereas 23,308 Bitcoin, now price greater than £1bn, linked to the investigation stays in circulation.

The £5bn funding fraud

The Bitcoin got here from a £5bn funding rip-off carried out in China by Zhang, 45, who arrived within the UK on a false St Kitts and Nevis passport after conning practically 130,000 Chinese buyers in fraudulent wealth schemes between 2014 and 2017, a court docket heard.

Wen was not alleged to have been concerned within the underlying fraud.

Zhang, who’s also referred to as Zhimin Qian (which suggests cash in Chinese) has fled the UK and her whereabouts are unknown.

Wen, 42, has been discovered responsible of 1 depend of cash laundering between October 2017 and January 2022 and the jury failed to succeed in verdicts on two comparable counts following a trial at Southwark Crown Court.

Prosecutors are usually not searching for a retrial and Wen will likely be sentenced on 10 May.

She was acquitted of 10 different cash laundering expenses at a trial final yr, which couldn’t be reported over fears hackers may goal the agency holding the seized cryptocurrency if the figures concerned have been made public.

As a Category A prisoner, Wen, a small girl carrying giant spherical glasses, was led to the witness field in handcuffs, whereas two dock officers guarded the door as she gave proof.

She instructed jurors she grew up in a working-class household in China, the place she met her husband Marcus Barraclough earlier than coming to the UK whereas closely pregnant on a spousal visa in 2007.

Wen’s way of life change

The relationship broke down following the start of their son and he or she lived a modest way of life in Leeds, the place she took a legislation diploma and accomplished a BA in economics earlier than shifting to London in the summertime of 2017.

She had already opened cryptocurrency accounts, making meticulous notes in her Wallace and Gromit pocket book, however stated she had “no idea” she would quickly be coping with Bitcoin on such a “massive scale”.

She utilized for dozens of jobs whereas working in a Chinese takeaway in Abbey Wood, southeast London, the place she lived in a room under the restaurant.

Wen stated she noticed an advert on Chinese social media app WeChat for a “butler” and first met Zhang on the five-star Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. She later described her function as “live-in PA for a high net worth individual” on her CV.

The girls quickly moved right into a £17,000-a-month Hampstead house after paying a £40,000 deposit and 6 months’ hire prematurely.

Wen took journeys to Thailand and Dubai and the ladies travelled extensively all through Europe, with Zhang – who used aliases together with Rose, Emma, and Hua Hua – avoiding nations with Chinese extradition agreements.

Hampstead mansions and a Tuscan villa

They bought Bitcoin and purchased advantageous jewelry, with receipts discovered for £25,600 and £18,750 from Christopher Walser Vintage Diamonds, in Zurich, and two watches price round £49,300 and £69,900 from Van Cleef & Arpels in Switzerland.

Over a three-month interval on the finish of 2017, greater than £90,000 was spent in Harrods on designer girls’s garments, jewelry and sneakers utilizing a rewards card in Wen’s identify, though she instructed jurors: “I was the one carrying the bags.”

Wen purchased two flats in Dubai for greater than £500,000 and regarded into shopping for a £10m 18th century Tuscan villa with a sea view.

But efforts to purchase multimillion-pound properties in London triggered anti-money laundering checks and not one of the purchases went forward as a result of the supply of the Bitcoin couldn’t be defined.

Wen initially claimed the cryptocurrency had been mined, then stated it was given to her as a “love present”, drawing up a deed of reward stating she had been given 3,000 bitcoin, then price £15m, by Zhang.

Prosecutors stated Wen acted as a “front person” to assist disguise the supply of the stolen cash, which had been used to purchase cryptocurrency to take away the proceeds from China.

‘I used to be duped’

Gillian Jones KC stated when Zhang landed in London she wanted to transform the Bitcoin again into money or “property, jewellery or other high-value items”.

Wen accepted she was concerned in an association coping with a number of the cryptocurrency however stated she didn’t know or suspect it was from the proceeds of crime, claiming she was “duped” by the girl she referred to as her boss.

“We were close… but looking back now, I was badly used,” she stated. “I have no idea where she is.”

Police say they’re nonetheless actively on the lookout for Zhang.