Jian Wen attempted to buy properties worth millions in the capital from 2017When Jian Wen arrived in the UK with barely £5,000 to her name, she took a job in a Chinese takeaway and moved into the gloomy basement bedsit below it.
It was only when she tried to acquire some of London's costliest properties, including a £23million Hampstead mansion, that alarm bells started to ring about the unexplained source of her funds. READ MORE - Money-laundering kingpin who hired mules including Joe Calzaghe's model ex and a Kim Kardashian lookalike to smuggle £104m of criminal cash from UK to Dubai must pay back £3.5m or get another 10 years in jail
In three months, more than £90,000 was spent in Harrods on designer clothing, jewellery and designer shoes using a rewards card in Wen's name. Wen poses at the Lindt shop in Zurich on one of her trips to Europe. She claimed it was to buy items for a jewellery business, producing receipts for diamonds and watches
Despite living in one of the world's most expensive cities, she earned just £5,979 a year - a pitiful sum that would have made her life a day to day fight for survival. Just weeks after meeting Zhang at the Royal Garden Hotel, Wen and the fraudster moved into a £17,000-a-month Hampstead mansion after putting down a £40,000 deposit.
She snapped up two apartments in Dubai for more than £500,000 and looked into buying a £10m 18th century Tuscan villa with a sea view. Jian went to Norway on business too. It was an incredible transformation for a woman who had been living above or below Chinese takeaways for years Advertisement Wen had insisted she had no idea the Bitcoin came from the proceeds of fraud and claimed she had been duped by Qian.