Who gets a $5 billion bitcoin hoard bought with stolen yuan

Elderly investors all over China handed their yuan to a company called Lantian Gerui. With part of that money, its boss Qian Zhimin bought bitcoin: about 6 billion yuan went into it, prosecutors say, roughly $845 million at the time. Today those coins are worth about $5 billion and sit with British police. The growth, it seems, won’t go to the investors.

On October 12, 2026, the High Court in London decided that the defrauded investors’ claims must be judged under Chinese law, not English law. It sounds like a legal technicality. Yet the ruling brings the British state closer to keeping most of the hoard, along with all the gains. And in New York, a hoard twice the size is being fought over by fraud victims, families of people killed on September 11, and China, which accuses the US of a hack.

The would-be queen of Liberland in Hampstead

Qian Zhimin, also known as Yadi Zhang, fled China on a fake passport in September 2017. In London she lived in a Hampstead mansion that cost over £17,000 a month in rent. Her assistant, Jian Wen, a former takeaway worker, tried to buy a house in an expensive suburb and couldn’t explain where her employer’s money came from. That is how the investigation began. In 2018, police found devices holding the keys to 61,000 bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency seizure in British history.

The most colourful details turned up in Qian’s diaries. She dreamed of her own international bank and a castle in Sweden, and by 2022 she wanted to be queen of Liberland, a self-declared micronation on a scrap of Danube riverbank between Croatia and Serbia that no country recognises.

In September 2025, Qian pleaded guilty to money laundering offences, and in November she was sentenced to 11 years and 8 months . “Your motive was one of pure greed,” the judge told her. That ended the criminal case. The civil one began, and it is the more interesting of the two.

The investors lost yuan, not bitcoin

One investor, Mr Yu, told the BBC how he handed his money to Lantian Gerui. The company drip-fed him part of his promised returns, so he never suspected a thing. In mid-2017 Chinese police began investigating the firm, and the payouts stopped. His marriage, he says, did not survive.

Neither Yu nor anyone else bought bitcoin. They handed over yuan, and it was Qian who turned their money into crypto. While the coins sat in Britain, they rose in value many times over. So who owns that growth: the people whose yuan was stolen, or the state that found the stash?

The answer depends on which law applies. Imagine a thief uses your money to buy a lottery ticket and wins. Under English law, the investors could argue that the winnings, meaning the coins themselves, belong to them. Under Chinese law they look more like creditors, and according to lawyers they would likely get back roughly what they put in, plus interest. The price of the ticket, not the jackpot.

Mr Justice Mark Turner chose Chinese law . His reasoning was that the scheme ran in China, the contracts were signed there, the money was paid there, and Qian bought the bitcoin there too, through the Huobi exchange and over-the-counter deals. Each claimant, he stressed, has to prove a property interest in the coins. The law itself has no general scheme to pay everyone who lost out: only those who prove the coins are theirs get anything.

Who gets the difference

By May 22, 2026, about 16,000 people had registered to claim a share in the British court. That is fewer than 13% of the 128,000 investors. Registering meant dealing with a foreign country, a foreign language and London lawyers. For an elderly investor in China, that is a bigger barrier than any statute.

The rest write letters. Investors gathered almost 2,500 signatures on an appeal to China’s foreign ministry: “We do not want, and will never accept, a situation where Bitcoins are confiscated by the UK and not returned to us.” Yu put it more modestly. He hopes the British government, prosecutors and the court will show compassion.

The state has its own plans. Prosecutors asked the court to let the government keep the bitcoin, and in the summer of 2025 The Telegraph reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves was counting on selling seized crypto to help fill a hole in the budget. Prosecutors later promised the court they would devise a separate compensation scheme , without giving details.

The investors are not giving up either. On October 16, the High Court gave about 16,000 claimants permission to appeal the ruling on Chinese law.

China has plans too. On October 13, the day after the London ruling, a court in Tianjin announced a case to confiscate nearly 62,000 bitcoin seized in Britain. Some 128,000 people put money in, and by Chinese figures more than 102,000 of them ended up out of pocket.

One set of coins, two courts.

In New York, twice as many coins

This story has an American sibling, and it is even more tangled. On October 14, 2025, the US Justice Department filed a forfeiture complaint against 127,271 bitcoin , then worth about $15 billion. Prosecutors link the coins to Cambodia’s Prince Group and its chairman Chen Zhi, accused of running compounds where trafficked workers were forced to scam people online. In January 2026, Cambodia arrested Chen Zhi and handed him over to China .

In late September 2026, Judge Rachel Kovner turned away nine alleged victims who wanted to contest the forfeiture. The logic resembles London’s: in both places, a victim has to prove the coins are theirs. These people lost money to fraudsters, but they could not show that their money ended up in these particular wallets. At best, the court said, they are general unsecured creditors with no claim to the coins themselves. If the government wins, victims can still ask the Justice Department for compensation, but as petitioners rather than owners.

Then the plot takes a turn no novelist would dare. Analysts believe the coins came from LuBian, a mining pool, which is a service where thousands of computers mine bitcoin together and share the rewards. As early as January 2026 , relatives of people killed on September 11 laid claim to the coins. They argue LuBian was tied to Iran, and they hold court judgments against Iran. On October 12, one of the family groups went back to court : its judgments say Iran owes it more than $671 million.

Meanwhile, China’s state cybersecurity agency CVERC accused the US in 2025 of having taken the coins that vanished from LuBian in December 2020 in an operation by American intelligence. The Justice Department denies wrongdoing but has not explained how it gained control of the wallets.

If the forfeiture goes through, the coins already have an obvious home. A presidential executive order of March 6, 2025 created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve funded with bitcoin the government has finally forfeited, and it bars the reserve from selling them.

The most transparent money nobody can return

Crypto has a reputation as money where everything is visible. Every transaction can be traced, and investigators use that: analysts linked the American hoard to the LuBian pool by following its trail on the blockchain. But a blockchain shows where a coin went, while a court asks a different question: whose is it? Between an investor’s yuan and a bitcoin in a police safe stand exchangers, middlemen and years of time. Drawing that line for each of thousands of people is close to impossible.

A lot remains uncertain. The London ruling is preliminary, and the court has already allowed an appeal. Even if it stands, experts on Chinese law still have to explain whether the investors have any property rights at all. There is no compensation scheme yet, and the American forfeiture is not final. Victims may end up getting their losses back, with the state keeping only the difference. Even that difference runs into billions.

Which makes for strange arithmetic. The best investment in this whole story was a fraudster’s decision to park other people’s money in bitcoin. And the party likely to profit most from it is the one that invested nothing and simply spent eight years holding on to the devices seized in her case.