Last week, the UK High Court ruled that the case must be governed by Chinese law rather than English law. After that, the Chinese prosecutor’s office began the process of seizing funds tied to Zhimin Qian in 2014–2017.
She ran Tianjin Lantian Gree Electronic Technology, which promised guaranteed high returns. However, the funds were used to buy real estate, BTC, luxury goods, and to pay earlier investors. The company raised 40.4 billion yuan ($6 billion) from 102,000 investors, who lost 20 billion yuan ($3 billion). In 2017, Qian fled to Britain, after which her assets were seized, including BTC, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV, Ripple, and Dogecoin. In 2025, a London court sentenced her to 11 years and 8 months in prison for running a pyramid scheme and laundering billions of dollars in BTC.