Eight people in Beijing were just sentenced for stealing over 140 million yuan, roughly $20 million, from a short video platform company and laundering the stolen funds through Bitcoin.
The operation, uncovered by the People’s Procuratorate of Haidian District, was one of the most intricate digital corruption cases prosecutors handled between 2020 and 2024, according to their newly released White Paper on Procuratorial Work on Anti-Commercial Corruption.
The entire fraud started inside the company, where an employee named Feng controlled how service providers joined the platform, how bonuses were set up, and how they got paid.
Feng signed off on who qualified for them and made sure the money went through. That much unchecked power made it easy for him to team up with two outside collaborators, Tang and Yang, and rig the system from the inside.
Feng built deliberate loopholes into the company’s bonus policies, then leaked private data to Tang and Yang so they could file fake documents that made it seem like they met the bonus requirements.
Instead of rewarding actual work, the stolen bonuses were redirected to fake participants. This went on for a year. By the time the scheme was exposed, 140 million yuan had already been funneled out of the company.
Yang told his associate Wang and others to set up multiple fake companies, shell firms with no real operations. Their only purpose was to collect the stolen rewards. Once the money was in, they moved it between accounts until it landed in Yang’s control. The company had no clue that the cash meant for growth had been hijacked by a small group of insiders.
The gang used coin mixers to hide the Bitcoin trail
After moving the money into shell accounts, Feng gave new instructions, this time to move the money into crypto. They used eight different international platforms to split the funds into batches of Bitcoin, hiding the movement across borders.
Then they used a method called coin mixing, which scrambles the trail of crypto transactions to make them untraceable. The goal was to make it impossible to figure out where the money came from, or where it was going.
By the time the funds were converted back into yuan, they had passed through multiple accounts and platforms. Some of that laundered money ended up back in company accounts secretly controlled by Feng, Tang, and Yang. Investigators later called it a “closed loop” money laundering chain, fueled by tech and hidden behind fake businesses and fake documents.
Prosecutor Li Tao, who works in the Science and Technology Crime division in Haidian, built an evidence system by comparing data, transaction records, and cash flow. That exposed every step of the fraud, from policy manipulation to the crypto transfers.
“We recovered over 90 Bitcoin during the investigation,” Li said. That recovery only covered a portion of the stolen funds, but it confirmed the gang’s methods and the money trail they tried to erase.
The court gave Feng the longest sentence, 14 years and six months, while the rest of the group got between three and fourteen years, with fines. All were convicted of occupational embezzlement.
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