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The mastermind of a scheme that defrauded tens of thousands of investors in China of billions of pounds pleaded guilty in London on Monday to laundering money in a case marked by Britain’s largest seizure of cryptocurrency, namely bitcoins, to date.

Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, 47, admitted possessing and transferring criminal property during the first day of her trial at Southwark Crown Court, 18 months after her assistant and interpreter, Jian Wen, 43, was convicted in the same venue of laundering £2 million of Bitcoin derived from the scheme and sentenced to nearly seven years in prison.

Qian’s case has made headlines in both Britain and China after the haul of 61,000 bitcoins that London’s Metropolitan Police seized from Wen and Zhang appreciated from an initial value of £305 million eight years ago to £5.5 billion currently, raising hopes among her 130,000 estimated victims that they may one day fully recover their losses.

Records from Wen’s case indicate that Qian launched an entity, Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology Company, in March 2014, ostensibly as a vehicle to offer a range of investments to victims across China, who ultimately relinquished £5 billion of their savings on the false premise that they would see returns as high as 300 percent.

Qian used an account at the Chinese cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, now known as HTX, to convert proceeds from the fraud to Bitcoin.

She fled China in July 2017 and arrived in Britain two months later on a St. Kitts & Nevis passport issued to her alias, Yadi Zhang.

Authorities caught up with her in York in April 2024, weeks after Wen’s conviction, and after nearly seven years on the run.

In Wen’s trial last year, her attorney cast Qian as a “supervillain” and master manipulator who dreamed of befriending the Dalai Lama, using her stolen wealth to buy and remake Liberland, a sliver of territory between Croatia and Serbia, into her own “kingdom,” and building Europe’s largest Buddhist temple.

The 47-year-old showed no emotion in the dock Monday as she pleaded guilty through a Chinese interpreter. She faces up to 14 year in prison.

Will Lyne, head of economic and cybercrime command at London’s Metropolitan Police, said Monday that Qian’s conviction brings a yearslong investigation to conclusion that benefited from “unprecedented cooperation with Chinese law enforcement.”

The Crown Prosecution Service has launched civil recovery proceedings in the High Court in London to permanently seize the 61,000 bitcoins, having encouraged victims in China last year to claim their share of the assets under section 281 of the Proceeds of Crime Act.

Yuhua Yang, a partner with Thornhill Legal in London, told ACAMS moneylaundering.com that recovering their losses will not be a straightforward process.

Victims must not only show a direct link between their initial investment and the bitcoins—a tough ask in any case—but must also find a way to bolster their claims with detailed evidence from Chinese authorities.

“For [Chinese authorities] to stand behind the victims and share their intelligence with their lawyers is not a process they are familiar with,” Yang said. “But there’s no other way to do it, and the stakes are high for everyone.”

Qian’s co-defendant, Seng Hok Ling, a 47-year-old from Matlock, Derbyshire, pleaded not guilty to one count of laundering an undisclosed sum of bitcoins for the fraudster.

His trial at Southwark Crown Court continues.

Contact Koos Couvée at kcouvee@acams.org