The Chinese Cryptoqueen

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Between 2014 and 2017 thousands of ordinary Chinese people handed their money over to a company that promised them fabulous riches by helping them to ride the wave of the future - cryptocurrency. That vision collapsed when the shadowy figure behind it, Qian Zhimin, fled to the UK with a Bitcoin stash bought with their money.

She settled down in London, planning her comeback as the Queen of Liberland, a scrap of land on the banks of the Danube. But her downfall began when she botched an attempt to buy a north London mansion. This alerted the police, who arrested Qian and seized a stash of Bitcoin now worth billions of dollars.

Many investors put everything they had into the company. Several have now told the BBC how they were persuaded to invest, and how the company’s collapse led to personal and financial ruin.

Now, as Qian is sentenced, the question remains: will the victims get their money back?

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:08.5	This is a promotional video for a Chinese investment company.
0:17.3	It's making big promises.
0:20.6	Invest in its cryptocurrency, and you'll get massive returns.
0:25.1	More than 100,000 people did just that.
0:30.1	I thought there was an opportunity.
0:32.5	So I sold my house in Beijing, and I got some of my father's pension,
0:36.4	my wife's savings, and my little brother's savings,
0:38.9	and invested it in the company. Then, it all went wrong. Lots of households put several million
0:46.6	or tens of millions of yuan into this. So the consequences were catastrophic. It's unprecedented,
0:54.0	really, in terms of both the scale and the complexity of the nature of the fraud itself.
0:59.4	Law enforcement now say the whole thing was a massive scam.
1:03.3	You're talking about something that's so big, the value dwarfs almost everything else.
1:08.2	And the numbers are so large, they don't really make sense anymore.
1:13.1	So how was it allowed to happen?
1:15.9	Who was the woman behind it?
1:18.0	And what will happen to the money?
1:21.5	This is the Chinese Crypto Queen
1:23.8	for the documentary from the BBC World Service.
1:35.7	I'm Tony Han, a reporter with the BBC's Global China Unit.
1:42.7	A dance troupe walks out onto a stage in the middle of a packed banquet hall.
1:46.1	They're all dressed in blue Mongolian-style costumes.
	...

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