Wen, 42, tried to buy properties in London, including a seven-bedroom mansion in Hampstead for £23.5 million with a swimming pool and a £12.5 million house with a cinema and gym.

By Henry Vaughan, Home Affairs Reporter and Feature Writer @Henry_Vaughan

Friday 24 May 2024, 2:49 pm, UK

A former Chinese delivery worker found guilty of money laundering after police seized more than £3 billion worth of Bitcoin has been jailed for more than six years.

Jian Wen, 42, came to the attention of police when he tried to buy some of London’s most expensive properties, including a £23.5 million seven-bedroom Hampstead mansion with a swimming pool and a nearby £12.5 million house with a cinema and academy.

The investigation led to the largest-ever cryptocurrency seizure in the UK, when more than 61,000 Bitcoins were discovered in digital wallets.

The cryptocurrency was worth £1.4 billion at the time, but its value has now risen to more than £3 billion, while 23,308 Bitcoin, now worth more than £1 billion, linked to the investigation remain in circulation.

Bitcoin allegedly came from a £5 billion investment scam carried out in China between 2014 and 2017.

Wen was not involved in the fraud, but reportedly acted as a “front person” to help disguise the origin of the money, some of which was used to buy cryptocurrencies and smuggled out of China on laptops.

Image: Wen rented a house for £17,000 a month in Hampstead. Photo: CPS

She was found guilty of one count of money laundering, relating to 150 Bitcoins, now worth almost £8 million, between October 2017 and January 2022 last month, following a retrial at Southwark Crown Court.

Wen was jailed today for six years and eight months by Judge Sally-Ann Hales KC, who told her: “I have no doubt you came to enjoy the finer things in life.

“The evidence showed that you and, to some extent, your family members were generously rewarded for your services.”

The court heard from Wen, who has been in custody as a category A prisoner since March 3, 2022, and plans to appeal his conviction.

Read more on Sky News:
Boy, 14 years old, arrested for terrorist crime
Orange cloud appears after ‘industrial incident’

Mark Harries KC, defending, said she “was a victim long before she became a criminal” and “was undoubtedly deceived and used” by the alleged mastermind of the operation.

Harries said she was “plucked from the humblest of origins,” working and living in “squalid Chinese restaurants” in a “luxury lifestyle” funded by Bitcoin.

Wen lived in a £5 million six-bedroom house rented for £17,000 a month near Hampstead Heath and traveled the world, spending tens of thousands of pounds on designer clothes and shoes at Harrods.

She drove a £25,000 Mercedes E-Class and sent her son to Heathside prep school, which cost £6,000 a term, the court heard.

Image: Wen visits the Lindt chocolate factory in Switzerland. Photo: Met Police Image: Wen tried to buy a property in Hampstead. Photo: she met the police

She bought two apartments in Dubai for more than £500,000 and considered buying an 18th-century Tuscan villa for £10 million with sea views.

But efforts to buy multimillion-dollar properties in London triggered anti-money laundering checks and none of the purchases went ahead because the origin of Bitcoin could not be explained.

Wen, who declared an income of just £5,979 in the 2016/17 financial year, was unable to explain the source of the funds and police first raided his home on 31 October 2018.

She accepted that she was involved in a deal that dealt with some of the cryptocurrency, but said she did not know or suspect that it was the proceeds of crime.

This is a limited version of the story, so unfortunately this content is not available.

Open the full version

The court heard that once Bitcoin was converted into fiat currency, it was loaded onto black prepaid cards that could be used anywhere in the world.

Wen, who has degrees in law and business, was acquitted of a number of other money laundering charges and Harries said she wanted to improve her and her son’s lives, initially through legitimate means.

She was the “conduit,” with “her simple task of pressing buttons for Bitcoin transactions” and had a “limited awareness of the extent of criminal activity to which she had inclined,” he said.

But prosecutor Gillian Jones KC said Wen was motivated by “greed” and her own “financial gain” not subject to “coercion, intimidation or exploitation”.

Fuente