Wen, 42, tried to purchase properties in London, together with a £23.5m seven-bedroom Hampstead mansion with a swimming pool and a £12.5m dwelling with a cinema and gymnasium.
By Henry Vaughan, House affairs reporter and have author @Henry_Vaughan
Friday 24 Could 2024 14:49, UK
A former Chinese language takeaway employee discovered responsible of cash laundering after police seized greater than £3bn value of Bitcoin has been jailed for greater than six years.
Jian Wen, 42, got here to the eye of police when she tried to purchase a few of London’s most costly properties, together with a £23.5m seven-bedroom Hampstead mansion with a swimming pool and a close-by £12.5m dwelling with a cinema and gymnasium.
The investigation led to the UK’s biggest-ever cryptocurrency seizure when greater than 61,000 Bitcoin have been found in digital wallets.
The cryptocurrency was value £1.4bn on the time however its worth has now risen to greater than £3bn, whereas 23,308 Bitcoin, now value greater than £1bn, linked to the probe stays in circulation.
The Bitcoin allegedly got here from a £5bn funding rip-off carried out in China between 2014 and 2017.
Wen was not concerned within the fraud however was stated to have acted as a “entrance individual” to assist disguise the supply of the cash, a few of which had been used to purchase cryptocurrency and smuggled out of China on laptops.
She was discovered responsible of 1 rely of cash laundering, referring to 150 Bitcoin, now value practically £8m, between October 2017 and January 2022 final month following a retrial at Southwark Crown Court docket.
Wen was jailed for six years and eight months at this time by Decide Sally-Ann Hales KC, who instructed her: “I’m in little doubt you got here to benefit from the higher issues in life.
“The proof confirmed you and, to some extent, members of your loved ones have been generously rewarded to your service.”
The courtroom heard Wen, who has been in custody as a Class A prisoner since 3 March 2022, plans to attraction the conviction.
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Mark Harries KC, defending, stated she “was a sufferer lengthy earlier than she grew to become a legal” and “was undoubtedly duped and used” by the alleged mastermind of the operation.
Mr Harries stated she was “plucked from probably the most humble of backgrounds”, working and residing in “shabby Chinese language eating places” right into a “life-style of luxurious” funded by the Bitcoin.
Wen lived in a £5m six-bedroom home rented for £17,000 a month close to Hampstead Heath and travelled the world, spending tens of hundreds of kilos on designer garments and sneakers in Harrods.
She drove a £25,000 E-Class Mercedes and despatched her son to the £6,000-a-term Heathside preparatory faculty, the courtroom heard.
She purchased two flats in Dubai for greater than £500,000 and appeared into shopping for a £10m 18th century Tuscan villa with a sea view.
However efforts to purchase multimillion-pound properties in London triggered anti-money laundering checks and not one of the purchases went forward as a result of the supply of the Bitcoin couldn’t be defined.
Wen, who had declared an earnings of simply £5,979 within the 2016/17 monetary yr, couldn’t clarify the supply of the funds and police first raided her dwelling on 31 October 2018.
She accepted she was concerned in an association coping with among the cryptocurrency however stated she didn’t know or suspect it was from the proceeds of crime.
The courtroom heard that after the Bitcoin had been transformed into fiat forex loaded on to black pay as you go playing cards which may very well be used wherever on the planet.
Wen, who has a diploma in regulation and a enterprise diploma, was acquitted of a string of different cash laundering expenses and Mr Harries stated she had wished to make her and her son’s lives higher, initially by legit means.
She was the “conduit”, with “her easy activity the urgent of buttons for transactions of Bitcoin” and she or he had a “restricted consciousness of the extent of the legal exercise to which she had leant herself,” he stated.
However prosecutor Gillian Jones KC stated Wen was motivated by “greed” and her personal “monetary achieve” not subjected to “coercion, intimidation or exploitation”.
