[The Epoch Times, April 8, 2024](Epoch Times reporter Fang Xiao reported) The largest money laundering case in the UK continues to attract attention. What will be done with the 61,000 Bitcoins seized has become one of the focuses of public opinion. Qian Zhimin, the main culprit in the case, planned the illegal fund-raising case of Tianjin Blue Sky Green in China. There is a deeper case – after the general manager of Blue Sky Green was detained, he bribed the public security officers handling the case with huge sums of money to provide financial services for Blue Sky Green. Explosions across the board laid the groundwork.
On March 18, the British court ruled that a Chinese-British woman, Jian Wen (transliteration. Different media have different Chinese translations of her English name), was found guilty of participating in money laundering and will be sentenced on May 10. The case involves 61,000 Bitcoins worth more than $4.3 billion.
These funds came from the Tianjin Blue Sky Gerui fraud case. The mastermind Qian Zhimin defrauded nearly 130,000 mainland Chinese investors from 2014 to 2017 and exchanged illegal gains into Bitcoin. On the eve of the incident, Qian Zhimin pretended to be Yadi Zhang (transliteration), obtained a passport from St. Kitts and Nevis, and fled to the United Kingdom in 2017. (Previous report:The female mastermind of the Tianjin fraud case escaped and planned the UK’s largest money laundering case）
Wen Jian was the housekeeper Qian Zhimin recruited in the UK. She cooperated with Qian Zhimin who was hiding behind the scenes and helped him convert some of these Bitcoins into a large number of tangible assets.
General manager of Lantian Gerui was detained and acquitted of bribery with huge amounts of money
According to the second-instance judgment of a public employee bribery case announced by the Jinzhou Intermediate Court of Liaoning Province in 2023, Tianjin Blue Sky Gerui Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. was established in March 2014 with a registered capital of 30 million yuan, and Ren Jiangtao is the only shareholder.
However, the “more well-known” business of Blue Sky Green Company is to launch a number of so-called “short-term investment and financial management” products using “high yield”, “guaranteed profit without losing money” and “theory of wealth in three generations” as bait, and pass them through layers of Through the development of offline methods, dozens of branches were quickly established across China, and most of the victims were elderly. It has also opened a “direct sales outlet” in Linghai City, a subsidiary of Jinzhou, to attract the elderly to “attend classes” and invest.
In August 2016, Wu Xiaolong (also known as Wu Xiaolong), the “franchise” of Blue Sky Grei in Linghai, Liaoning, was detained by the local police on suspicion of illegal storage. The case was hosted by Zhang Lie, then deputy captain of the Economic Investigation Brigade of the Linghai Municipal Public Security Bureau. However, because Wu Xiaolong paid 15 million yuan in bribes to Zhang Lie and other public officials, the case was temporarily shelved. Wu Xiaolong was therefore “released on bail pending trial.”
This also paved the way for Blue Sky Gerui to explode across the board in 2017.
According to the latest report from Caixin, a Chinese media outlet, Wu Xiaolong and Qian Zhimin have known each other for many years and Blue Sky Green was co-founded by them. Wu Xiaolong is the general manager of Blue Sky Green.
In August 2016, there was news in the WeChat group of investors that “something happened to Blue Sky Grei”, referring to the arrest of Wu Xiaolong, Qian Zhimin’s number one “entrepreneurial partner” and the general manager of Blue Sky Grei; but everyone Everyone believed that Qian Zhimin’s “supernatural powers” and Bruce Wu’s timely appearance allowed their Ponzi scheme to continue for more than a year in many places across China.
According to the court verdict, after Wu Xiaolong was arrested, under the instruction of Qian Zhimin, Fan from Blue Sky Gree Company asked others to help Wu Xiaolong obtain bail pending trial. During this period, Fan sought help from Huo Jian, then deputy secretary and deputy manager of Linghai Water Company, and promised to pay huge benefits.
Huo Jian immediately asked Zhang Lie many times to help Wu Xiaolong be released on bail pending trial, and promised to pay huge benefits, and Zhang Lie agreed.
The judgment disclosed that on August 25, 2016, with Qian Zhimin’s consent, Fan transferred a total of 15 million yuan in benefits to the Agricultural Bank of China card in Huo Jian’s name in three installments through online banking transfers; on August 26 of the same year, Huo Jian instructed his wife Wen to transfer 5 million yuan of the above-mentioned benefits to an Agricultural Bank of China card in Wen’s name, and withdraw the remaining 10 million yuan in cash to Huo Jian; on the same day, Huo Jian kept 2 million yuan from it After receiving 8 million yuan in cash, the remaining 8 million yuan in cash was handed over to Zhang Lie.
On September 12, 2016, Zhang Lie, in the name of the Economic Investigation Brigade, petitioned Xu, then captain of the Economic Investigation Brigade, on the grounds that Wu Xiaolong could voluntarily confess the criminal facts and the detention period had expired, and the main criminal facts had not yet been ascertained and the case had not been settled. After approval by XX and Wang, the deputy director in charge, Wu Xiaolong was released on bail pending trial.
Afterwards, Huo Jian once again handed Zhang Lie 300,000 yuan in cash in the name of a thank you fee. During the handling of the Lantian Gerui case, Huo Jian received a total of 6.7 million yuan in favor fees, and Zhang Lie received a total of 8.3 million yuan in favor fees.
The above-mentioned criminal acts of Huo Jian and Zhang Lie were not investigated and punished until several years later, in June 2022. The two were only arrested in September 2022.
Huo Jian was found guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Zhang Lie was convicted of bribery, embezzlement, and misappropriation of public funds, and was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Qian Zhimin concocted a virtual currency scam
Blue Sky Green is headquartered in Tianjin and has four departments: marketing, conference affairs, promotion, and finance. It is divided into seven regions across the country-Changchun, Shenzhen, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, Chengdu, Tianjin, and Wuxi. Its external brand is “British Love Life Insurance”.
A witness testified that British Health Care Insurance actually sells Blue Sky Green’s products, and the money and contracts were obtained from Blue Sky Green, but they were stamped with the official seal of the British Health Care Company. Qian Zhimin said that the British Aisheng Company is a company registered in the UK by Ren Jiangtao. The company has basically no profit. In fact, it just takes the money from the investors behind and gives it to the investors in front of it, demolishing the east wall to pay for the west wall, and rolling back and forth.
In fact, British Life Insurance is a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands in March 2017 and does not have any type of insurance license.
In the product introduction of Blue Sky Grei, in addition to Bitcoin, the capital investment is mainly a virtual currency called Dotcoin. The so-called Dotcoin is a virtual currency “issued” by Blue Sky Grei that is completely modeled after Bitcoin. It is claimed to be “an encrypted digital currency based on the SHA256 algorithm”. “The output is halved every four years, with a total of 6.3 billion.” “, and also launched a trading platform – Duote China in response to the trend. In fact, according to the confession of an accomplice brought to justice, Dotcoin “was designed by a company in Shenzhen.”
Blue Sky Grei also has so-called “multi-bitcoin supercomputing centers” in many places across the country, and has established seven “automated mines” in five regions across the country, claiming to have deployed “18,000 multi-bitcoin mining machines”. A large number of investors were also organized to visit the site. Many investors were convinced after seeing the computer room scene. In fact, the computer room is filled with servers that have long been eliminated and treated as scrap.
After the number of participants in Blue Sky Grey’s Bitcoin and Multi-bitcoin products reached a bottleneck period, Qian Zhimin also concocted a so-called “Bitcoin insurance company”, the aforementioned British Lifestyle Insurance.
The Ponzi scheme continued for three years. At the end of July 2017, Blue Sky Grei issued an announcement to suspend dividends due to financial system upgrades. At this time, Qian Zhimin had already completed the investment immigration process and obtained a new identity, and was preparing to run away.
The Bitcoin involved in the case is still trading after “disappearing”
A detail was revealed in the British court. Although the money laundering case had been investigated as early as October 2018, the tracking and seizure of these Bitcoins actually began in July 2021. British police have not explained why it took nearly three years to formally take action. During this period, 4,500 Bitcoins “missed” from the digital wallet involved.
Elliptic, a crypto-asset research institution in London, identified the digital wallets involved, the stolen wallets, and the fund paths by matching relevant parameters and transaction behaviors based on the transparency of the Bitcoin blockchain. It said that between 3:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. on May 30, 2021, a total of 6,241 Bitcoins were transferred out from the Bitcoin address “1HBM45n214sV9yXoizBwTksUgEysTPpk46”; since then, investigators have recovered an additional 1,741 Bitcoins. , and the whereabouts of 4,500 Bitcoins are unknown.
Elliptic’s analysis also said that the majority of the 4,500 Bitcoins were transferred in two directions: a small cryptocurrency exchange (which has been previously suspected of money laundering), and a mixer (used to hide further blockchain transactions).
Elliptic also traced the origin of the assets held at the address. The bitcoins originated from a digital wallet that received a large number of bitcoins between January and April 2017, almost all from two sources: a large cryptocurrency exchange and a digital wallet.
“It is unclear who moved the 4,500 Bitcoins from the digital wallet. It is possible that backups existed, and even if the digital wallet was seized by investigators, there is also the possibility that someone moved the funds. Interestingly, not all of the lost Bitcoins were They were immediately transferred and purged. Some remained dormant until January 2024, when they continued to be transferred to small exchanges,” Elliptic’s analysis report said.
On January 28, 2024, a transaction of US$1.08 million occurred in the stolen wallet. Based on the price at that time, 25 Bitcoins were transferred.
Caixin reported that it tried to interview Tom Robinson, the co-founder and chief scientist of Elliptic, but had not received a reply from him as of press time.
Can 61,000 Bitcoins be recovered?
It is estimated that the funds recovered by victims of major illegal fund-raising cases in Tianjin may be less than 5% of the principal. What will be done with the 61,000 Bitcoins now seized by the British police has become the focus of public opinion.
Is it possible that the 61,000 Bitcoins that have increased in value more than 60 times in seven years can be partially recovered and returned to the victims in China?
In September 2024, the UK will hold hearings to decide what to do with the seized Bitcoins. British media reported that the British police stated that they had not received any asset recovery request from China. Under British law, if no one else is entitled to the assets, half of the confiscated funds are given to the police and the other half to the Home Office.
Caixin sent an interview letter to the Metropolitan Police asking about the disposal of the assets involved, but as of press time, it had not received a reply.
On April 3, the International Cooperation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice of the Communist Party of China responded to Caixin’s inquiry and stated that on December 2, 2013, China and the UK signed a treaty, which provides a legal basis for judicial assistance in tracing, freezing, seizure and other procedures between China and the UK. However, the International Cooperation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice stated that it did not have information about specific cases and was not in a position to disclose it. ◇
Editor in charge: Lin Congwen#
2024-04-08 09:33:27
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