Chinese victims of a bitcoin scam believe the U.K. government has their money
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
From the BBC World Service: Thousands of victims of a huge investment scam believe police in London have nearly $4 billion worth of bitcoin that belongs to them and want the British government to give it back. Then, The European Central bank held interest rates steady but gave strong hints about future rate cuts. Plus, we hear about padel, one of the world’s fastest growing sports, and its Olympic ambitions
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Chinese crypto fugitive on the run from British authorities and the curious case of |
| 0:05.8 | three billion dollars worth of missing Bitcoin. |
| 0:09.0 | That's where we're going to start the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service, |
| 0:12.0 | Wilbane. Ian For Leanna again today, great to have your company. Place Morning Report from the BBC World Service, Will Bain, |
| 0:12.8 | Ian For Leanna again today, great to have your company. |
| 0:15.1 | Yeah, thousands of Chinese victims of a huge investment scam |
| 0:18.6 | believe police in London have got more than $3 billion worth of |
| 0:22.1 | Bitcoin that belongs to them, and they want the British government to give it back. |
| 0:25.1 | The BBC's Nick Marsh takes up the story. Nick, extraordinary story, take us through all the background |
| 0:30.1 | because there's plenty of twists and turns. We're talking about more than 100,000 people in China who are tricked into giving their money |
| 0:37.2 | to what they thought was a wealth management fund, but actually it was a scam. |
| 0:41.9 | Now the woman behind this Zimin Tian collected around 4 billion dollars as part of this scam and she basically got her assistant called Jan Wen, a British Chinese woman, to do a runner with the cash. |
| 0:56.5 | Quite incredibly, Jan Wen, I mean she was working in a Chinese takeaway in the UK. |
| 1:01.9 | She was living above a restaurant in Leeds in 2017 and she |
| 1:07.0 | converted all of this stolen money into Bitcoin. She basically started to live a very lavish lifestyle. She moved into this six bedroom house in |
| 1:15.8 | hamstead in North London. That cost 17,000 pounds a month, which I don't know how much that is in |
| 1:22.1 | dollars, but it's even more than that. |
| 1:24.0 | She moved her son to the UK to attend private school and really where the law caught up with |
| 1:28.6 | her was when she started to buy all of these houses and she was struggling to pass the money laundering checks. |
| 1:34.8 | Now she said that she got all this money from mining Bitcoin, the UK police didn't believe her, |
| 1:39.4 | that's when she was arrested and she was actually convicted last month. |
| 1:43.4 | What then happens to all these people, most of them in China, whose cash is still missing? |
... |
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