The Runaway “Cryptoqueen” Is Now Behind Bars — and Her £5bn Bitcoin Stash Too
For years, people in China thought they were investing their savings into a futuristic health-tech and crypto venture. More than 100,000 pensioners and ordinary citizens poured their money in, believing it would grow. Instead, police say the woman behind it all, Qian Zhimin, siphoned off the cash and used it to buy cryptocurrency — a stash that has now ballooned into billions. After slipping out of China and arriving in the UK under a fake passport in 2017, she settled into a luxury Hampstead mansion just steps away from the heath, paying more than £17,000 a month in rent. To turn her Bitcoin into spendable cash, she reinvented herself as a wealthy heiress dealing in antiques and diamonds, even hiring a former takeaway worker as a personal assistant to quietly convert the crypto into property and money. But the privacy didn’t last. A year later, the Met Police stormed the mansion and uncovered one of the largest single crypto seizures ever recorded. On Tuesday, at Southwark Crown ...