She drove a black E-Class Mercedes-Benz, shopped at Harrods and enrolled her son at prestigious £6,000-a-term Heathside preparatory school in the same super-rich corner of north London.
These assets, the biggest seizure of its kind in the UK, have now been frozen and Wen is facing jail after being convicted of one count of money laundering at Southwark Crown Court last month. Bitcoins can be bought from online trading exchanges or platforms like shares are then stored in 'virtual wallets'.
A particularly revealing aspect of this case is how many brokers offering investment advice were prepared to help 42-year-old Wen, who would have faced due diligence checks to prevent dirty money being washed. Wen lived initially in Halifax and Leeds where she completed a law diploma and gained a BA in economics.
The 'interview' took place at the 5-star Royal Garden Hotel on High Street Kensington. There to meet her was a middle-aged woman in traditional Thai dress. Wen insists she thought the mysterious high-roller she met at the Royal Garden was a businesswoman who had made her money from a family jewellery firm.Apart from anything else, the defendant, it transpired, was already using three different accounts to trade in Bitcoins before she had apparently met the woman who would become her boss and benefactor for the first time.
Eleven bank accounts were held in her name and, most significantly, she knew the secret passwords, known as private keys, which allowed access to 61,000 Bitcoins in digital wallets – whose value has now risen to more than £3billion – in laptops hidden in a safety deposit box in St John's Wood. The shopping list is eye-watering. Wen kept meticulous notes of what was bought and sold in a Wallace and Gromit notebook.
Mr Loginov was singled out for criticism by the prosecution who said his role should come with a 'health warning' because 'he was aware that there was a difficulty as to the source of the funds.' Burke's father, also called Michael, co-founded Ireland's largest domestic drug manufacturer, Chanelle Pharma.