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.
Despite being on the run from the law for nearly seven years, Qian spent a lot of money and even traveled to many countries while purposefully avoiding nations with extradition treaties with China. She also planned to sell around US$250,000 worth of Bitcoin monthly to fund her lifestyle and eventually become “the monarch of Liberland” — a micronation nestled between Croatia and Serbia.
She “accepts her conviction and the mistakes that led to it,” Roger Sahota, Qian’s lawyer, said in a statement. “She never set out to commit fraud but recognizes her investment schemes were fraudulent and misled those who trusted her.” On the other hand, the sentencing judge told her, “You lied and schemed, all the while seeking to benefit yourself. With the assistance of people you recruited and whose loyalty you bought, you succeeded in evading justice for over seven years.”
We expect Zhimin Qian to serve her entire sentence within the British Isles while China and the U.K. government iron out how to return the billions of dollars she stole from Chinese investors. And given that the UK has suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong, there’s no easy way for Beijing to request Qian’s repatriation so she can face charges in her home country.
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