Jian Wen got here to Britain to ‘benefit from the higher issues in life’.
The 42-year-old drove a E-Class Mercedes-Benz, indulged in £30,000 Harrods purchasing sprees and enrolled her son at prestigious £6,000-a-term Heathside Preparatory College close to her £5 million house.
It was solely when she launched into constructing a worldwide property empire, trying to purchase a £23m Hampstead mansion, a £10million Tuscan villa and flats in Dubai that alarm bells began to ring concerning the single mom who barely had £5,000 to her identify when she arrived within the UK to work in a Chinese language takeaway.
Yesterday the Chinese language immigrant who helped launder Bitcoin from a £5bn funding fraud was jailed for greater than six years.
Choose Sally-Ann Hales, KC, stated Wen performed a key function in a classy legal enterprise who was ‘generously rewarded’ for her work laundering the proceeds of a wealth administration swindle in China, the place 128,000 buyers have been duped.
Police have linked Wen’s accounts to a staggering £3.4billion within the cryptocurrency, which she was serving to a fraudster to launder in Britain.
After Wen moved to Britain in 2007 she ended up residing under a Chinese language restaurant in London, incomes simply £5,979 a yr.
However life modified after she noticed an advert on Chinese language social media app WeChat to be a ‘butler’ for a lady who claimed to run a world enterprise buying and selling in diamonds and antiques.
Simply weeks after assembly the girl at a five-star resort in Kensington, Wen moved to a £5million six-bedroom manor home close to Hampstead Heath rented for £17,000 a month.
The pair travelled all over the world, holidaying in Europe, Thailand and Dubai beneath varied aliases, whereas Wen opened a sequence of cryptocurrency accounts making meticulous notes of transactions in a Wallace and Gromit pocket book.
They bought Bitcoin and acquired effective jewelry, forking out on over £44,000 value of gems at Christopher Walser Classic Diamonds in Zurich, and watches value £119,000 from Van Cleef & Arpels.
In three months, greater than £90,000 was spent in Harrods on designer clothes, jewelry and footwear utilizing a rewards card in Wen’s identify.
She snapped up two flats in Dubai for greater than £500,000 and appeared into shopping for a £10m 18th century Tuscan villa with a sea view.
Wen then tried to purchase a £23.5m seven-bedroom Hampstead mansion with a swimming pool and a close-by £12.5m house with a cinema and fitness center.
However the spending spree triggered anti-money laundering checks and the purchases have been halted after she couldn’t clarify the supply of the Bitcoin she deliberate to make use of to pay for the properties.
Wen initially claimed the cryptocurrency had been mined, then stated it was given to her as a ‘love current’.
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Scotland Yard launched a significant investigation making the UK’s biggest-ever cryptocurrency seizure in 2021 when greater than 61,000 Bitcoin have been found in digital wallets hidden in a security deposit field.
The cryptocurrency was value £1.4billion on the time, however its worth has now risen to £3.4billion.
Wen insisted she had been duped by her boss.
Her lawyer Mark Harris, KC, stated: ‘Ms Wen was a fragile, determined girl whose shallowness can’t have been in a really excessive place in any respect.
‘She was a susceptible girl. She was undoubtedly duped and used.’ However Choose Hales advised the defendant: ‘I’m in little doubt that you simply got here to benefit from the higher issues in life.
‘The proof confirmed that you simply have been generously rewarded to your providers.
‘It’s submitted in your behalf that your culpability falls into the medium vary. I don’t agree. The offending was refined and it concerned important planning.
‘I don’t agree that your involvement within the offence was as a consequence of any component of exploitation.
‘I don’t agree along with your counsel’s characterisation of you as a sufferer.’
Wen was sentenced to 6 years and eight months at Southwark Crown Court docket for coming into or changing into involved in a cash laundering association between October 2017 and January 2022
