UK court told woman involved in major bitcoin scam lived in luxury

Authorities discovered several devices, including a laptop containing a cryptocurrency wallet with £27.3mil (RM149.15mil) worth of bitcoin. — Pixabay

LONDON: A Chinese fraudster involved in a bitcoin scam worth more than £5.5bil (RM30bil) spent years evading British authorities sightseeing across Europe and staying in luxury hotels, a court heard.

Zhimin Qian, 47, masterminded a Ponzi scheme which defrauded more than 128,000 victims in China between 2014 and 2017 and stored the illegally obtained funds in bitcoin assets.