£5bn Investment Scam

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 into a £5m six-bedroom house near Hampstead Heath.

The woman - who claimed to run an international jewellery business trading in diamonds and antiques in countries including Japan, Thailand and China, travelled the world and spent tens of thousands of pounds on designer clothes and shoes in Harrods.

New Affluent Lifestyle - In her newly affluent lifestyle, Wen bought a £25,000 E-Class Mercedes and sent her son to the £6,000-a-term Heathside preparatory school. But alarm bells rang when she tried to buy some of London's most expensive properties, including a £23.5m seven-bedroom Hampstead mansion with a swimming pool and a nearby £12.5m home with a cinema and gym.

Wen, who had declared income of just £5,979 in the 2016/17 financial year, could not explain the source of the Bitcoin she would use to pay for the properties and police first raided the women's home on 31 October 2018.

But it would be another two-and-a-half years before investigators realised they had made the UK's biggest-ever cryptocurrency seizure when more than 61,000 Bitcoin were discovered in digital wallets. The cryptocurrency was worth £1.4bn at the time but its value has now risen to more than £3bn, while 23,308 Bitcoin, now worth more than £1bn, linked to the investigation remains in circulation.

The £5bn Investment Fraud - The Bitcoin came from a £5bn investment scam carried out in China by Zhang, 45, who arrived in the UK on a false St Kitts and Nevis passport after conning nearly 130,000 Chinese investors in fraudulent wealth schemes between 2014 and 2017.

Wen was not alleged to have been involved in the underlying fraud. Zhang, who is also known as Zhimin Qian (which means money in Chinese) has fled the UK and her whereabouts are unknown.

Wen, 42, has been found guilty of one count of money laundering between October 2017 and January 2022 and the jury failed to reach verdicts on two similar counts following a trial at Southwark Crown Court. Prosecutors are not seeking a retrial and Wen will be sentenced on 10 May.

She was acquitted of 10 other money laundering charges at a trial last year, which could not be reported over fears hackers could target the firm holding the seized cryptocurrency if the figures involved were made public.