What were two Chinese women doing in a rented mansion in London with an astronomical amount of cryptocurrency?
Detective Constable Joe Ryan arrived at a red-brick manor house in Hampstead, north London, early on the morning of October 31, 2018. Ryan, a veteran money-laundering investigator with the Metropolitan Police, had obtained a warrant to search the property as part of an investigation into the activities of a 36-year-old woman named Wen Jian.
By the time the police had the full picture, Zhang had disappeared. Wen’s housemate was a fugitive wanted in China for masterminding a massive investment fraud, they discovered. Wen was arrested in May 2021 and stood trial at Southwark Crown Court on 12 counts of money laundering and criminal possession last year. Legal restrictions have limited public reporting of the proceedings until now. This article is based primarily on evidence and testimony given in court.
Zhang claimed that she owned a jewellery business and had come to set up shop in the UK. She had a limp from a car accident and breathed heavily. Wen had no references, but Zhang offered to pay her £4000 a month in cash to be her “carer and translator”, as she later described the job. Zhang told her new assistant that she needed new clothes, a bank account and a permanent place to live.Zhang’s real name was Zhimin Qian. She was on the run from the Chinese authorities.
Still, in general, she trusted Zhang, Wen said. She didn’t think to question her. Zhang’s sensibilities seemed in line with cryptocurrency circles, Wen told the court. Zhang had told her that her wealth came from legitimate sources, such as jewellery and bitcoin mining. “I did not know she had involved anything in China at all,” she testified.
Since bitcoin’s creation in 2009, regulated financial institutions have viewed the sector warily, worried about money-laundering risks. The “relatively anonymous nature of bitcoin makes it an attractive means for anyone who wants to hide the source of illegally obtained money”, said the judge in Wen’s case, Alexander Milne KC. He hastened to add that “doesn’t mean if you own bitcoin you’re a crook”.
As the Totteridge Common deal progressed, Liffen pressed Wen for more information about the source of Zhang’s crypto. Zhang had said she had mined her bitcoin but had not kept any records. Liffen wanted to see addresses for the bitcoin on the public blockchain database that records transactions, the court heard, allowing his firm to trace the history of the money that was going to be used for the purchase.
Shortly after the Dublin incident, Wen created what would become a pivotal piece of evidence. She photographed the pages of a notebook with details of passwords for Zhang’s bitcoin wallets and stored them on a pink USB stick.The jury were not told how exactly Detective Constable Ryan caught wind of Wen’s activities. But on October 10, 2018, he sent Wen an email informing her he had obtained a freezing order on the £850,000 her law firm still held.
Wen kept what remained of the £40,000 deposit and the Mercedes. Before Zhang was due to be interviewed by the police, she disappeared. “I have heard nothing since from her,” Wen told the court.
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