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Former takeaway worker Jian Wen’s transformation seemed like a modern fairy tale as she went from serving customers at a Chinese restaurant in Leeds to renting a six-bedroom mansion in North London for £17,000 ($21,000) per month. But this wasn’t some feel-good entrepreneurial success story—it was the U.K.’s largest cryptocurrency money laundering case, involving over 61,000 bitcoins that would be worth $6.7 billion today.
In March 2024, the 42-year-old former takeaway worker was convicted after helping convert stolen cryptocurrency into cash, jewelry, and real estate. Yet the question for many watching the case remained: Was Wen a sophisticated criminal who knowingly laundered millions in stolen funds, or was she simply a vulnerable single mother manipulated by what her lawyer dubbed an “expert criminal supervillain” exploiting her desperate wish to provide a better life for her son?
From Rags to Riches to Prison
Before 2017, Jian Wen had the unglamorous reality of many struggling immigrants—living in a cramped flat above a Chinese restaurant in Leeds, U.K., working long hours at the takeaway downstairs to make ends meet as a single mother. In 2015 and 2016, she declared earnings of just £12,800 ($16,000) and £5,979 ($7,500). By autumn 2017, she was posing as an employee of an international jewelry business and had moved into a six-bedroom North London mansion with a Chinese national known to her as Zhang Yadi (whose real name is Zhimin Qian).
Besides the monthly rent on the mansion, which was more than her previously declared annual salary, her new lifestyle included flying her son from China to attend private school, buying properties in Dubai, and purchasing expensive jewelry in Zurich. But when Wen went to buy luxury properties around London, she kept getting flagged by banks’ anti-money laundering examiners. Those checks led to reports to authorities that would ultimately take her from a suddenly tony new life to prison.
When questioned about her sudden wealth, Wen claimed she had earned millions through legitimate bitcoin mining—a story prosecutors say was fabricated to hide her role in laundering stolen cryptocurrency into tangible assets.
Tip
Just as a fast getaway car was the means for racing stolen money from the scene in the bank robberies of yesteryear—their numbers are down some 85% since the early 1990s—cryptocurrency is proving essential for moving massive sums illicitly today.
Where Did the Crypto Come From?
The bitcoins at the heart of Wen’s case were bought with money scammed from 130,000 Chinese investors between 2014 and 2017. When Chinese authorities began investigating the £5 billion ($6.4 billion) fraud in 2017, the mastermind behind the scheme, Qian, fled to Britain using a fake St. Kitts and Nevis passport. This is when Wen enters the picture.
Prosecutors argued that Wen served as a front for laundering the money via bitcoin. The operation was sophisticated: bitcoins were used to move money out of China (Qian took it with her on a Lenova laptop), then converted back into cash and luxury assets in the U.K. and Dubai.
Police later discovered that Wen had access to digital wallets containing more than 61,000 bitcoins, worth £1.4 billion ($1.8 billion) when seized in 2021.
Delusions of Divinity
In a case full of extraordinary details, perhaps one of the most peculiar is that Qian dreamed of being anointed a “reincarnated goddess” by the Dalai Lama and ruling as Queen of Liberland—a tiny, uninhabited micronation on the Danube River. Her reality was far less grand: Wen testified that Qian spent most of her waking hours in bed, playing video games on her laptop and moving cryptocurrency, while waking most nights screaming from nightmares.
The Defense That Divided Opinions
Wen’s defense at trial depicted her as a classic unwitting patsy. Her lawyer, Mark Harries, argued that she was simply another victim of an “expert criminal supervillain” who had “used her and abandoned her because she was dependable and expendable.” According to this narrative, Wen believed she was working for a legitimately wealthy Chinese businessperson and didn’t know about the criminal origins of the money. She was only trying, her lawyer said, to provide a better life for her son.
Wen was ultimately sentenced to six years and eight months on one charge—the jury deadlocked on two others—and she was ordered to pay back £3.1 million ($4 million). Qian, on the lam until after Wen’s conviction, is scheduled to stand trial in London in September 2025.
The Bottom Line
Jian Wen’s conviction represents far more than the culmination of just another money laundering case. It highlights the explosive rise of cryptocurrency in international crime while also demonstrating how promises of quick riches often lead people into far worse circumstances than the struggles from which they were trying to escape.
