China moves to confiscate $5 billion in bitcoin held in the UK

Chinese prosecutors have asked a court in Tianjin to confiscate about 61,800 bitcoin seized in Britain, worth roughly $5 billion, after a London judge ruled on October 12 that Chinese law decides who the coins belong to.

Court filings show the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court accepted the confiscation application on September 28 and published a public notice on October 13, according to reporting by Decrypt and crypto.news. The notice lists 61,896 bitcoin seized from Zhimin Qian by UK authorities, along with other tokens and cash.

What the Chinese court is asking for

Qian's scheme ran in China from April 2014 to August 2017. It worked through a firm called Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology, which sold unlicensed wealth products that promised guaranteed returns. The scheme pulled in more than 40.38 billion yuan, about $5.7 billion, from investors across the country. UK prosecutors have cited about 128,000 victims. The Tianjin court notice counts more than 102,000, with combined losses above 19.9 billion yuan.

Part of that money was moved into bitcoin and carried to Britain. The application covers far more than the coins alone. It also lists about 72,746 units each of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin SV, roughly 3.6 million XRP and around 70 million Dogecoin, plus cash in dollars, euros and pounds, jewelry and bank balances. Victims in China have six months from the court's acceptance to join the case.

What the London court decided

On October 12, the High Court in London ruled on a narrow but central question: which country's law decides whether the seized bitcoin belongs to the victims. The case is Director of Public Prosecutions v Zhimin Qian. Mr Justice Turner held that Chinese law, not English law, governs those ownership claims.

That ruling came out of civil recovery proceedings the Director of Public Prosecutions brought under Part 5 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. The state wants to recover the assets. Victims had applied under section 281 of that Act for a declaration that the coins are theirs. They hoped to rely on English rules for tracing stolen property. The judge closed that door.

Turner did not decide who owns the bitcoin. He ruled only on which law applies. Whether the victims hold a property right under Chinese law, and what evidence proves it, now goes to a later hearing. Fieldfisher, the law firm acting for the claimants, is seeking to appeal. No date has been set.

Why the choice of law matters

The difference is not technical. Under English law, victims might have claimed the coins and the full gain they have made since 2017. Under Chinese law, as the ruling frames it, recovery is usually limited to the original money lost plus interest. That gap runs into billions.

David Phillips, a dispute resolution partner at the London firm SMB, wrote after the ruling that a victim "cannot necessarily recover cryptocurrency simply by proving" that the coins were bought with money taken from them. Ownership is a separate question from whether bitcoin can be traced on its public ledger.

Prosecutors said the stolen money was moved into about 70,000 bitcoin held on a laptop wallet. Investigators seized about 61,000 of them. Those coins are worth far more now than when they were bought, Caixin reported. Seized and flagged coins are familiar ground for enforcement agencies, and the US Treasury already keeps a public list of sanctioned bitcoin addresses. What is new here is the size of the stash and the tug of war over it.

Those sums move with the market. Bitcoin traded at $81,812 at 02:41 UTC on 23 October 2026, according to CoinGecko. At that price the 61,896 coins are worth about $5.06 billion. Decrypt put the figure near $5.1 billion at a price around $82,000.

Even if the Tianjin court approves the confiscation, the coins sit in the UK. Britain has its own claim to them under the Proceeds of Crime Act. Two states now point at the same wallet, and the people who lost the money may end up behind both.

What to watch

Two clocks are now running. The Chinese court's six-month window sets a deadline for victims there to register. An appeal of the London ruling, if Fieldfisher files it, could reach the Court of Appeal in 2027. Neither track will hand anyone the coins soon.

A harder question sits under both. If Chinese law caps recovery at principal and interest, the roughly $5 billion in appreciation does not obviously flow to the victims. It could go to the Chinese state, or stay with the British one. The coins have not moved. The fight over them has barely started.