Warring ex-lovers who settled a bitter dispute over the ownership of valuable horses were once business partners with a man who has been dubbed "Britain's Bernie Madoff".
Police said the investigation into Zhimin Qian, 47, led to officers recovering devices holding 61,000 Bitcoin in the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the U.K. Qian, dubbed "cryptoqueen" by British media, was arrested in April 2024 after spending years evading the authorities and living an "extravagant" lifestyle in Europe, staying in luxury hotels across the continent and buying fine jewelry and watches, prosecutors said.
As Chinese police closed in on the architect of a massive Ponzi scheme that cost thousands their life savings, a woman in her mid-40s, with an accomplice, fled on a moped to Myanmar's border, starting nearly seven years on the run. After zig-zagging across Southeast Asia, she landed at London's Heathrow airport in September 2017 on a forged St Kitts and Nevis passport in the name of Zhang Yadi.
Rory Campbell launched the fund in 2017, vowing to beat the bookies with bets on games around Europe, including in England's Premier League and Spain's La Liga. Some were said to have lost up to 500,000 from their involvement in the failed fund. One of the investors reportedly died before receiving his money back. Campbell's father and mother Fiona Millar were reported to be facing losses running into hundreds of thousands of pounds relating to the alleged 5 million Ponzi-style pyramid scheme.
According to court filings and the defendant's admissions, Rodriguez and his co-conspirator Edwin Carrion founded the Technical Trading Team (TTT) in the spring of 2020. Rodriguez had sole trading authority over the vast majority of the nearly $5 million raised from over 20 individual investors. Rodriguez and Carrion promised investors annual investment returns ranging from 18% to 24% and convinced them to invest based on a number of material misrepresentations.
Miles "Burt" Marshall was widely trusted in upstate New York, promoting an "8% Fund" investment scheme that ultimately proved to be a Ponzi scheme, leading to his bankruptcy.
