The Chinese Cryptoqueen

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:46This is a promotional video for a Chinese investment company. It's making big promises. Invest in its cryptocurrency and you'll get massive returns. More than 100 ,000 people did just that. I thought there was an opportunity. So I sold my house in Beijing and I got some of my father's pension, my wife's savings, my little brother's savings and invested it in the company. Then it all went wrong. Lots of households put several million or tens of millions of yuan into this. So the consequences were catastrophic. It's unprecedented really in terms of both the scale and the complexity of the nature of the fraud itself.

1:33Law enforcement now say the whole thing was a massive scam. You're talking about something that's so big, the value dwarfs almost everything else and the numbers are so large they don't really make sense anymore. So how was it allowed to happen? Who was the woman behind it? And what will happen to the money? This is the Chinese crypto queen for the documentary from the BBC World Service.

2:05I'm Tony Han, a reporter with the BBC's Global China Unit. A dance troupe walks out onto a stage in the middle of a packed banquet hall. They're all dressed in blue Mongolian-style costumes. A few are wearing thick glasses. Some have freshly permed hair. They're all in their 50s and 60s. As a traditional Chinese tune starts to play, they launch into their dance routine. It's 2016, and this event is being held to promote an array of investments from Lan Tian Ge Rui, including the cryptocurrency they have created, DealCoin. In ballrooms and banquet halls across China, similar events are being held, mostly attended by older investors.

2:57At the time, Bitcoin, the world's biggest cryptocurrency, was exploding in value following its launch five years earlier. And now, the company says there's a Chinese alternative.

3:14To capture the energy, the buzz, the company even commissions this rock song. It's played to crowds of hundreds or even thousands at their events. The chorus goes, Disrupt, disrupt, the finance mould we break. Disrupt, disrupt, where truth and trends awake. In addition to food, there are other giveaways. Air purifiers you wear around your neck, smart toilet seats, and what Lantengure claims is a life-saving smartwatch. That has its own song too. I am on your wrist. You are in my heart, go the lyrics. A man I'm just going to call you was impressed. He agreed to talk, as long as we don't use his real voice or name.

4:07His words are being spoken by an actor. The company had a lot of money, so it got a lot of talented speakers, real salespeople. They'd take a bundle of rice stalks and tell you it was gold. These people, well, they were really talented. What can you say? He and his wife each bought a unit of one of the company's investment products for 60 ,000 yuan. That's around 8 ,000 US dollars. And soon, he was seeing returns around 10 US dollars each working day. After about two years, you would make three times what you put in. On top of that, for each person you convinced to invest, you'd get a bonus added on to your daily payout.

4:58So that was a huge incentive to market the company's product to others. You started putting back into the company everything he was making from it. For the first time in his life, he got a credit card and took out a loan to invest more. There was no rule that you had to reinvest your earnings. But I suppose we were just too weak to resist. They just pumped up our dreams. Until we lost all self-control, all critical judgement. At the centre of Lan Ting Ge Rui is a woman called Qian Zhimin. known to investors as Hua Hua or Little Flower. Her name isn't on the company's official registration documents.

5:47She rarely shows her face. But investors and employees know she is the brains behind the operation. At larger events, loyal investors could sometimes catch a glimpse of her. A small business owner called Li is invited to one such event in Wuxi near Shanghai. Having gone through security, he finds himself in a room full of hundreds of people, and eventually he spots Qian.

6:17It looked like she'd got something like a lace curtain and wrapped it around the lower half of her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. She was also in a wheelchair. She had a car accident, so someone would always be wheeling her around. She doesn't say much in the packed hall, but Li likes what he sees of the company and decides to invest. He draws on his own assets as well as those of his wife and little brother and even some of his father's pension pot. In all, he invests 12 million yuan into Lan Tianguri. That's around 1.7 million US dollars. In the eyes of the company, that makes him a big investor.

7:01And this status gets him entry into smaller, more intimate meetings with Qian. She was a good talker, very sharp. Those of us there, you could say we were starstruck. We all saw her as our goddess of wealth. She started encouraging us to dream big, telling us she'd make us rich. and within three years she'd give us enough wealth to last our family's three generations. On top of the promise of personal wealth, Lan Tian Ge Re also trumpeted patriotism. Our love of country was our Achilles heel. That's what they exploited. They said they wanted to make China number one in the world, to lift the Chinese people to their rightful place in the world.

7:53At one event, he says the son-in-law of Chairman Mao, the founding father of the People's Republic of China, spoke on behalf of the company. We in our generation all looked up to Chairman Mao, so if even his son-in-law was vouching for it, how could we not trust it? Qian was selling a dream to the Chinese people, a chance to ride the wave of modern technology and finance, amass fabulous wealth for themselves and their descendants, and help China rise on the global stage. For a while, everything seemed to be going to plan.

8:34One Thursday afternoon in mid-2017, Yu checks his phone for the daily notification that the payout has arrived in his bank account. But as afternoon turns into evening, the payment still hasn't arrived. Eventually, the company announces that police are doing some checks, but the payouts should resume soon. Then they told us to open accounts with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Before that, we'd always received payouts at the Agricultural Bank of China. So we opened new accounts, but still, the money didn't come. He gives the company the benefit of the doubt. The company had always paid us on time and we still had a lot of goodwill towards it.

9:24But after one month, three months, five months and then half a year, we were still waiting.

9:35The money never comes. Eventually, he learns that after investigating, the Chinese police find that Lan Tianguru's cryptocurrency mines are fake. Qian had used Yu and other investors' money to buy tens of thousands of Bitcoin. Yu's life fell apart. He and his wife argued bitterly over what to do next. I tried to fix the situation. But in the end, we divorced. Many families have been broken up. People have been left without money to pay for medical treatments. All this has really happened. Our son was just about to apply to university at the time, and I was afraid that all this would ruin his future.

10:26So I gave up custody of my son and took all the debt on my wrong shoulders. About 900 ,000 yuan in all. That's more than 120 ,000 US dollars. In chat groups with fellow investors, there was fierce debate over what had happened. Tens of thousands of people had lost money, in some cases their life savings. Just two months before it all came crashing down, Li had invested more than a million dollars. I was one of those who lost the most, a huge sum of money. But once you're in that situation, you can curse the heavens and the earth all you want. But what good can it do? With investors left high and dry, the big question now was, where was Qian?

11:22If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

11:56You're listening to the documentary on the BBC World Service, The Chinese Crypto Queen. Qian fled China shortly after Chinese police started investigating Lan Tiangke Ri. After a time in Southeast Asia, she arrived in the UK in September 2017 on a St Kitts and Nevis passport under the name of Yadi Zhang. With a laptop loaded with Bitcoin, she moved into a mansion in the upmarket London suburb of Hampstead. Qian takes on the persona of a wealthy antiques and diamond heiress named Rose. She hires a personal assistant by the name of Wen Jian, a former Chinese restaurant worker in her 30s. Qian gets Wen to trade her cryptocurrency into hard cash and real estate.

12:46Their WhatsApp messages were later seized by UK police. Hello boss, I've sold one coin for£4 ,679. Oh, I don't want to sell at this price. It will be£20 ,000 or more after four years. Understood. If it reaches£10 ,000 by the end of the year, I'll wish I was dead. The lowest price I wanted to see this year was£6 ,000. Worrying. Let me cry for a bit. Don't stop me. The price is unpredictable. Selling tens of bitcoins at this price is not the problem. Imagine selling several thousand. I'd feel like my heart was being stabbed by a knife. With the money from the bitcoin sales, Wen and Qian did go on some sightseeing trips around Europe.

13:46There's photos of them outside castles and in chocolate shops. But Wen testified in court that Qian spent most of her days lying in bed, gaming, online shopping and trading cryptocurrency. Plagued by nightmares, she would often wake screaming at night. All the while, her Bitcoin was appreciating in value, increasing from several hundred million to billions of dollars. Eventually, though, the fact that most of Qian's wealth was held in Bitcoin and not pounds sterling or dollars or euros caught up with her. In late 2018, Detective Constable Joe Ryan of the Metropolitan Police received a report about a suspicious transaction flagged by a law firm.

14:32The firm was saying that Wen was trying to buy an eight-bedroom property with her boss using a load of Bitcoin. She couldn't explain where the Bitcoin had come from. And it was during the process of that being bought that I got involved and I started looking at the cryptocurrency following the cryptocurrency chains where you look at the analysis of wallets and the claim was that the big ones was from mining and analysis shows it wasn't. In October 2018, DC Ryan and other officers raided the Hampstead mansion. They were looking for Wen. At this stage, they knew virtually nothing about Qian. We read to the address.

15:19Miss Wen was outside it in her car. Initially, she didn't want to let us in. I tried to ask her to open the door. She delayed for quite a considerable time, but she eventually let us in. When we went in, searched the house to see who was there. Miss Chan was in a bedroom at the back in a different room to Miss Wen. The moment police find Chan is captured in this body cam footage. Hello, madam. I appreciate you're in bed. I've just got to record down your name, if that is all right. So what's your first name, please? The whole house, a very large house, fairly messy, and there was cash almost everywhere.

16:00Thousands of pounds, bundles of£20 ,000 here, £12 ,000 there, envelopes with money in. There was even a coat hanging up in a cupboard that had£3 ,000 in the pocket. As well as cash, DC Ryan and his team found a lot of electrical equipment. There was a purple filing cabinet in Miss Chan's bedroom, and that held the laptops that had the bulk of the cryptocurrency on. And there was a safe in her room that had passwords and access codes to the laptops. I know this is wrong, but my impression of her was that she wasn't especially bright. and at that time I thought she might have been a cleaner that had picked up a laptop in a crypto exchange and stolen it and had the crypto from that source.

16:51Years later, knowing a lot more about her, that was an act and she's very good at acting. When officers later tot up the sum of cryptocurrency on the laptops, it amounts to 61 ,000 Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency seizure in UK history. On one of the devices, they also find text files, which contain notes written by Qian about her future plans. I must learn more English. I must practice so many words a day, read this book, do other things. A lot of it was a bit more something that you aspire towards, such as you and I might talk about what would you do if you won the lottery? And you just have a conversation and say, oh, I'd travel here and go there.

17:34And a lot of things were like that. One of the things that did come up in the trial with Miss Wen was her intention to become monarch of Liberland, which is an interesting idea, and the amount of money she's going to spend on jewellery and crowns and scepters. She also writes about a fund she plans to set up to pay off her debts in China. But she'll only set it up when the price of Bitcoin reaches a certain value. Police didn't arrest Qian Owen the day they raided the property. It's only when they investigate further that officers realised there was more to this case, and more to Qian. We found that Niz Qian was wanted by the Chinese authorities, that it became obvious that she was the leader.

18:18And the more information we got about her involvement, because it was a lot later that we found out that she was actually the leader of the fall, not just a lower-down member. and it was only then that it became obvious that she is very clever, she is very switched on, very manipulative, able to persuade a lot of people what's going on. Her assistant, Wen Jian, was charged and later convicted of laundering money. She received a sentence of more than six years' imprisonment. But Jian, who had directed and supervised Wen, simply disappeared.

18:56Six years after Detective Joe Ryan first started working on the case. A breakthrough. They're investigating a Malaysian man living in the UK after seeing some suspicious cryptocurrency transactions. And when DC Ryan watches the CCTV footage of him, he sees, to his disbelief, the woman he'd first seen lying in bed in that Hampstead mansion. I was surprised that she was in the UK. I thought she would have left. Her passport indicates that she did leave. But bear in mind there were lots of false passports involved in this case. We don't know how she got back into the UK because her passport doesn't show it.

19:38So presumably she used a false passport to come back into the UK. She shouldn't have really been here. Qian had moved to another property, in the northern UK city of York. In the early hours of the morning, officers raid it.

19:56Heading in through the front door, they move upstairs before kicking Qian's bedroom door open. There, once again, they find Qian in bed, on red silk sheets. Is it Zimin Qian? Do you speak English? I need help. You're under arrest. You're going to be arrested for money laundering. Section 329, process of crime. Now, Detective Constable Joe Ryan gets the chance to interview her again, this time with a lot more knowledge of what she's capable of. She was very meek, so I went to get her from the cell to bring her into the interview room, and she was walking very hunched over, walking very slowly, very small steps.

20:40Now, bear in mind, I'd seen her on CCTV, a couple of weeks earlier. So I knew she could walk normally. So this is all part of the act that she's trying to portray, that she's ill, infirm, trying to encourage people to feel sorry for her. Qian answers no comment to most of DC Ryan's questions. But she does provide a written statement, insisting that her activities in China were legitimate. She also says that she came to the UK to seek refuge from a Chinese government crackdown on cryptocurrency entrepreneurs. The authorities did ban cryptocurrency exchanges in 2017, the year that she fled. In September 2025, her trial for money laundering opens.

21:25I'm here now just standing outside Southwark Crown Court, waiting to be let into the first of Tianzhimian's hearings. It's a clear, crisp morning, lovely blue sky. There's a bit of chill in the air. and it all feels a bit surreal that the fate of this woman who touched the lives of tens of thousands of people all over China should be decided here in this room halfway across the world. The gallery is packed. After a very brief morning session in which Qian confirms her identity, the court turns to other matters. We come back for the afternoon session and it's announced Qian is changing her plea.

22:06When the charges were read out to her, I was watching her face, and she seemed to be kind of struggling to master her emotions. It seemed to me that she was biting her lower lip, and watching her closely, you could see her speak the words, you couldn't hear them, but then they were repeated, or immediately repeated loudly by her interpreter, so that the entire court could hear. And immediately after that, she was taken away from the defendant box and out of the courtroom because for her, of course, this trial is over. The question now remains, who will get the Bitcoin seized from Qian by UK police, now worth more than US$6 billion?

23:00Li and Yu are hoping some of it will come back to them. We don't expect to recoup everything. But if we can gather all the evidence together, we hope the British authorities can show compassion, can return us a portion of our losses. Half, even a third would do. But if nothing comes back to us, then really it will be devastating for us. Both Li and Yu are participating in a UK legal case which aims to identify the rightful owners of the Bitcoin. But only a tiny fraction of the total number of victims have got involved. Zhou, one of the younger investors to lose money, explains why she isn't going down this path.

23:52You need to hire lawyers to pay lawyers fees. We don't plan on paying even more money to chase this thing. We're waiting for the state to intervene, for the police to give us updates. My hope is that the case gets closed as soon as possible. That's all money belonging to us Chinese citizens. Qian Zhimi is a Chinese citizen and she scammed other Chinese. She did take the money over there, but the money is ours. It doesn't belong to the UK. Usually in a case like this, unclaimed money would go automatically to the UK government. But in this case, the UK's Crown Prosecution Service is setting up an additional and unprecedented compensation scheme.

24:37However, Louise Abbott, a lawyer who specialises in cryptocurrency fraud, says the details haven't been shared yet. There's so many areas for it to look at. For example, the victims themselves are not in one easy category. There are different victims. Some have participated. Some have already got compensation from China. Some can prove their proprietary tracing claim. Some can't. So there's lots of different categories. There's then the issue of what's the value of their claim and making sure there's no double recovery. So this is going to take some really careful working between our government and the Chinese government to work out how properly it is to be done.

25:19But we're in the early stages of that at the moment. Li Yih stayed up until the early hours of the morning following news reports of Qian's trial. After hearing that she pled guilty, he celebrated with his elderly parents. All of us victims in China feel the truth of the old saying. Justice might be delayed, but never denied. After such a long wait, Qian's guilty plea has given us a glimpse of sunlight. We hope that the UK courts will be open and just with British and Chinese citizens alike and support the justice of victims' claims and make good our losses. Fellow investor Yu went through a time when he had just 10 yuan, or around a dollar, in his pocket.

26:14He was living on instant noodles and sweet potato for weeks on end. He lives on his own now. He doesn't talk to his son. But he has managed to pull himself out of debt. He too has closely followed Qian's arrest in the UK and the seizure of the Bitcoin bought with investors' money. The police in the UK must be very talented. We all read Sherlock Holmes books when we were younger. And in our minds, that's still the image of the real detective. To find all this Bitcoin, of course, we are very grateful. Here in China, we hope that we can get the capital returned to us. That's our great hope. Humans have that great quality of empathy.

27:04And at the end of the day, we are all human. to be able to save the victims of Lan Tiangiri, who are struggling and suffering, even to save their lives. What a noble act that would be.

27:24The Chinese Crypto Queen, a documentary from the BBC World Service, was presented by me, Tony Han, and produced by Guy Kilty. The sound engineer was Craig Boardman. The editors were Ankur Shah and Rebecca Henschke.

28:06and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.