China and Great Britain are both claiming ownership of 61,000 illegal Bitcoins

The 61,000 Bitcoins which British police seized from a gang of Chinese crypto criminals are now worth approximately $6.7 billion. That fortune is, of course, coveted by authorities in both China and the UK.

Tianjin

As we reported last month, a case is underway in London’s Southwark District Court against Ms. Zhimin Qian, a Chinese woman who committed fraud between 2014 and 2017, defrauding thousands of victims of their money. When police raided her London villa in 2018, they also found access to several online crypto wallets containing approximately 61,000 Bitcoins. When she committed her fraud in China, these Bitcoins were worth around $10,000 each. Ever since then, that value has risen to $110,000 per Bitcoin, making it the largest Bitcoin heist ever.

As the Chinese newspaper South China Morning Post also noted, both the governments of the United Kingdom and China are now interested in this wealth. The plan is to reimburse the victims of the fraud (which took place between 2014 and 2017) their original investment at a rate of $10,000 per Bitcoin. The affected Chinese investors were defrauded through a company called Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology. They were promised exorbitant profits which, of course, never materialized.

This leaves a tidy sum of around $6 billion for the government that ultimately gains control of all the stolen Bitcoins. China, which officially bans Bitcoin trading on its territory, has suddenly become very interested in the matter and claims that, since the fraud took place on its soil, they are entitled to the Bitcoins. The British government sees it differently.