Recently, I keep coming across a story about a "big sister"—at first glance, she looks just like a warm-hearted aunt from the vegetable market, but upon deeper investigation, I found out that this Zhimin Qian is quite remarkable; she was once the "encryption queen" who shocked the world.

Her resume is like a magical realism script. In 2014, under the title of a Tsinghua PhD, she founded Tianjin Blue Sky Grey Company. On the surface, it focused on health technology, but secretly it was all about the Bitcoin mining gimmick, drawing in over 100,000 people with a "lying down to earn" promise, rolling up to 4.6 billion pounds.

In the next three years, luxury banquets were held one after another, and the PPTs were made more exquisite than anyone else's. Investors were hypnotized by brainwashing-style promotion, continuously pouring money in. On the eve of the funding chain collapse in 2017, she had quietly converted most of her assets into Bitcoin—this move laid the groundwork for her later escape.

After the Chinese police opened an investigation, she escaped to the UK with a fake passport. She initially planned to use £40 million to buy a luxury home in London to clean her identity, but her plan fell through due to the KYC review process. In 2018, British police kicked down her door and seized 61,000 bitcoins, worth over £5 billion at the time! This confiscation amount remains a global record to this day.

In 2025, the British court finally sentenced her to 11 years and 8 months in prison for money laundering and holding illegal encryption assets. Behind this are the hard-earned money of 128,000 Chinese victims.

What does this case expose? The anonymity and cross-border liquidity of encryption make it an ideal tool for money laundering. Those "high return, zero risk" promises are often carefully packaged traps. Whether it's the halo of a PhD or a luxurious setup, they only serve to make the scam look more respectable.

What do you think? Is it the worship of academic qualifications that makes people lose their vigilance, or are regulatory loopholes giving scammers an opportunity? Do you have any friends who almost fell into similar traps?