After the conviction: what comes next in the largest UK cryptocurrency seizure

In November 2025, Zhimin Qian was sentenced at Southwark to eleven years and eight months for her role in laundering the proceeds of a Chinese investment fraud — the Lantian Gerui scheme — which had been converted into Bitcoin and brought to the United Kingdom in around 2017. The Metropolitan Police had seized the wallets in 2018. By sentencing, seven years later, the holdings were comfortably the largest cryptocurrency seizure in any English judicial proceeding to date.

The conviction was, in one sense, the end of a long road. It was also the beginning of a different one.

The defrauded investors — by all reasonable estimates, around 128,000 of them, almost all in mainland China — were not parties to the prosecution. They were never going to recover their losses through the criminal process. What had been seized was effectively held by the Metropolitan Police, on terms set by the statutory framework that governs criminally-derived assets. To get any of it back into the hands of the people from whom the money originally came, somebody had to start a civil recovery. That is what is now happening in the King's Bench Division of the High Court, case-managed out of Manchester. Our firm acts for one of the cohorts of applicants; there are several others, each separately represented.

It is, in a perfectly ordinary sense, the kind of work for which the firm's combined English and Chinese footprints were always going to be useful. From inside the case, that intuition has held up rather better than one might have predicted.

A few observations on what running it is actually like.

The applicant pool is large, geographically remote from the court, and almost entirely non-English-speaking. The substantive determinations turn on what each applicant invested, when, in what currency, with what entity, and what they got back. The evidence base for all of that exists in mainland China, in Mandarin, and is bound — both physically and legally — by the data-protection and personal-information regimes of the People's Republic. The Court has accordingly had to interrogate the boundary between the requirements of English civil procedure and the regulatory architecture of another sovereign data-protection regime in a way that older case law simply does not address. The arrangements that have been put in place are, on the public file, workable. They have not, however, been quick.

The case management has also had to handle the fact of multiple, separately-represented cohorts pursuing parallel claims against a single asset estate. There is a structured machinery in the Civil Procedure Rules — the GLO regime — for the situations in which civil claims of similar character are pooled. This case is not using it. The Court has instead built a bespoke architecture, drawing on group-litigation thinking while remaining within the statutory recovery framework. There will be points of detail in that architecture, once it has run its course, that practitioners will cite for years.

Behind those procedural questions sits the substantive prize: how the English law of equitable tracing — and the choice between English and PRC law to govern it — operates against an asset class that did not exist when the leading cases were decided. That question is on the docket for substantive determination in the ordinary way. It is not for an article to anticipate its outcome.

A decade ago, the typical instructed brief in English asset-recovery practice involved a single victim (or a small group), a single defined asset, and an evidence base in the same jurisdiction as the court. The civil recovery now under way is the opposite of that on every dimension I can think of. There will be more cases like it. London is, for reasons that have very little to do with the policy choices of the British authorities, the world's most natural destination for cryptocurrency that began life as the proceeds of crime in Asia; the gravitational pull is unlikely to abate; and the next generation of recovery proceedings will be litigated against the template this matter is now laying down. Some of us will be acting in them.

For investors who consider that they may fall within the defrauded class — or who have already filed but would like a second view on where they stand — we are open to confidential conversations. The same goes for professional advisers who suspect their clients have similar exposure and would like to discuss it before exposure turns into an instruction.

I will return to the substantive points when the merits have been decided.

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Jackson Ng MCIArb is a Partner and Barrister at Duan & Duan UK LLP. This commentary is general in nature and does not constitute legal advice on any specific matter; readers should obtain advice tailored to their own circumstances.