A US district judge in Washington has ruled that Facebook-parent Meta Platforms did not violate antitrust laws with its acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp more than a decade ago.
The decision hands a defeat to the Federal Trade Commission, the US antitrust watchdog, which sued Meta in 2020 claiming the company secured a monopoly in social media by purchasing its rivals.
“The Court ultimately concludes that the agency has not carried its burden: Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market,” wrote Judge James Boasberg on Tuesday.
The company hailed the decision in a statement provided to the BBC, saying it “recognizes that Meta faces fierce competition.”
In April, Judge Boasberg presided over a lengthy bench trial that featured testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg who argued that TikTok and YouTube had shaken up the social media landscape.
In his decision, Judge Boasberg noted that the FTC reviewed and approved of Meta’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram and the 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.
The agency had argued the company overpaid when it purchased Instagram for $1 billion and WhatsApp for $19 billion.
Judge Boasberg described a constantly changing social media landscape, “with apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others, and adding new features with each passing year.
Even if Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, he said the FTC failed to show “that it continues to hold such power now” as Meta’s market share “seems to be shrinking.”
In a statement to the BBC, the FTC indicated it wasn’t certain whether it plans to appeal.
“We are deeply disappointed in this decision,” said Joe Simonson, director of Public Affairs at the FTC, who added the agency was reviewing all of its options.
Simonson also told the BBC that “the deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg,” who has clashed multiple times with the Trump administration and is facing an effort by congressional Republicans to have him impeached.
The BBC has asked Judge Boasberg for comment.
With its victory on Tuesday, Meta avoids a potential break-up of the company which could have included spinning off Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Our products are beneficial for people and businesses and exemplify American innovation and economic growth,” a Meta spokesperson told the BBC on Tuesday. “We look forward to continuing to partner with the Administration and to invest in America.”
The decision comes after the Department of Justice won two prior antitrust cases against Google – one alleging a monopoly in online search and the other in advertising technology.
But earlier this year, another district judge in Washington presiding over the online search case declined to force Google to spinoff its Chrome browser, a step the justice department had suggested was necessary to end the tech giant’s search monopoly.
Against that backdrop, Tuesday’s ruling against the FTC “does feel like a change in momentum,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, an antitrust law professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
“I think that’s going to influence the likelihood of more cases like this being brought.”
But, Allensworth added, the ruling doesn’t indicate that the government’s efforts to crack down on antitrust behaviour are failing.
“It’s a mixed bag,” she said.
Many legal observers say that the FTC case against Meta was challenging from the start.
The case “was always a difficult one, particularly given how quickly we have seen changes in the social networking market in recent years,” said Laura Phillips-Sawyer, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Still, she said, the case revealed “a series of statements by Zuckerberg at the time of those acquisitions that looked like a desire to squelch a nascent threat to Facebook’s dominance”.
Meta’s legal entanglements aren’t over.
Mr Zuckerberg has been ordered to testify in a landmark trial over the impact of social media on young people.
Last month, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl rejected Meta’s argument that an in-person appearance in January was unnecessary.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri is also slated to testify at the trial, which stems from accusations that Meta and other social media companies make their apps addictive to young people despite being aware of mental health risks.
A British man who hacked high profile Twitter – now known as X – accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam has been ordered to hand over £4.1m in stolen cryptocurrency.
Joseph O’Connor, from Liverpool, hijacked more than 130 accounts in July 2020, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk.
The 26-year-old fled to Spain where his mother lives before being arrested and extradited to the US for trial.
He was sentenced to five years for cyber crimes but now must hand over a haul of crypto he gathered through various hacks and scams.
O’Connor, who went by the alias PlugwalkJoe, carried out the so-called “giveaway scam” with other young men and teenagers – breaking into Twitter’s internal systems and taking over high profile accounts.
Three other hackers have been charged over the scam, with US teenager Graham Clark pleading guilty to his part in the deception in 2021.
The hackers gained access to the accounts by first convincing a small number of Twitter employees to hand over their internal login details – which eventually granted them access to the social media site’s administrative tools.
They used social engineering tricks to get access to the powerful internal control panel at the site.
Once inside the Twitter accounts of famous individuals, they pretended to be the celebrities and tweeted asking followers to send Bitcoin to various digital wallets promising to double their money.
As a result of the fraud, an estimated 350 million Twitter users viewed suspicious tweets from official accounts of some of the platform’s biggest users, including Apple, Uber, Kanye West and Bill Gates.
Thousands were duped into believing that a crypto giveaway was real.
Between 15 and 16 July 2020, 426 transfers were made to the scammers of various amounts from people hoping to double their money.
A total of over 12.86 BTC was stolen which at the time was worth around $110,000 (£83,500). It is now worth $1.2m.
The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said investigators believed more crypto linked to O’Connor was obtained through criminal hacks he carried out with other teenagers and young people he met whilst playing Call of Duty online.
The CPS has recovered 42 Bitcoin and other digital currency in total from him.
Adrian Foster, Chief Crown Prosecutor for the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division, said O’Connor “targeted well known individuals and used their accounts to scam people out of their crypto assets and money”.
“Even when someone is not convicted in the UK, we are still able to ensure they do not benefit from their criminality,” he said.
When I rather nervously shared a personal post about dealing with brain fog at work on the social network LinkedIn last week, I had no idea that it would have such an enormous impact.
It’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Women have stopped me on the street to talk to me about it.
I’ve been overwhelmed by hundreds of messages from people sharing support and their own experiences of it.
Usually I cover technology news. But given the response, it felt important to talk about this as well.
“Brain fog” isn’t a medical term. But you may well know exactly what I’m talking about.
That moment when you suddenly can’t remember the word for something really obvious, or you’re mid-sentence and you lose your train of thought. It’s infuriating, and it can be embarrassing.
Where was I?
Ah yes, for me, as a woman in my 40s, it’s coincided with perimenopause – the stage in my life where my hormone levels are changing. There can of course be other neurological conditions for which brain fog can be a symptom too.
If you’re in a job where public speaking is part of what you do, it can be particularly terrifying.
“I’ve spent 30 years being professionally articulate,” wrote Janet Edgecombe, an internal communications expert.
“All of a sudden I’m forgetting the words for basic things. ‘That grey thing in the thingy that we cook chicken on’. My husband replies ‘oh, the baking tray in the oven’. Hmm. ‘Yeah, that thing’.”
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I also heard from teachers, start-up founders having to present pitches for money to investors, women running workshops, delivering speeches – and fellow journalists trying to report live on-air, like me. But of course it can also hit mid-conversation, in a more intimate but no less frustrating way.
My post was about my decision to hold a page of notes on the BBC News at Ten. A story had broken late in the afternoon, following an already busy day, and by the time we reached 10pm, I knew I was getting tired and I could feel the brain fog.
I was going to talk about an outage that was affecting dozens of websites and apps, and I planned to use the technical jargon for it, as given by the company affected, and then explain what it actually meant.
But I just couldn’t get the phrase to stick in my head and I knew that without it, I wouldn’t manage the rest of what I needed to say.
I was reporting live from Glasgow. Like many of my professional peers, I do not have, and I’ve never had, autocue. And so, for the first time, I decided at the last minute to hold a page of notes with the offending phrase on it.
It felt to me at the time like an admission of failure. I have been trained never to use notes – unless there’s a specific legal reason why the wording of a statement, for example, has to be precise, or there are a lot of figures to remember.
Even then, I have prided myself on having a good enough short-term memory to get me through.
Using notes is discouraged in the world of public speaking. They are not permitted to anyone giving a 12-minute TED talk. The speaker is expected to memorise their speech.
Looking down the barrel of the camera and clutching that paper, live on TV, felt tough.
But around 10% of women report leaving their jobs due to menopause symptoms, according to the Fawcett Society. And research by insurance firm Royal London found that half of women going through it have considered giving up work. I don’t want to do that – and so I stuck with my solution.
To my intense relief, some people said they thought my paper looked authoritative, that they just assumed it was a breaking story and the page contained fresh information. Others asked why I hadn’t used a device instead – I suppose I thought the potential of having to fumble with a screen would feel even worse.
“Let’s start a movement: Hold your notes,” wrote Elisheva Marcus, vice president of communications at the venture capitalist firm Earlybird.
And so, the hashtag holdthenotes was born.
“Have you ever checked your testosterone levels?” menopause expert Dr Louise Newson asked me.
She says testosterone – despite its reputation for being a male hormone, and its association with sex drive and libido, is actually an essential brain chemical for both men and women, and levels fall in both genders. One of the results is brain fog.
“It’s like you’ve been drugged,” she says. “It’s really scary, a lot of people worry they’ve got dementia.”
“I remember when I had my levels done 10 years ago, and I was like ‘Thank God, at least I know why I’m feeling so awful’.”
She adds that there are studies dating back to the 1940s indicating that testosterone can improve brain function and wellbeing in women as well as men, but the randomised control studies, where participants are given either a placebo or the product itself in order to see whether it really works, have only focused on improvements to libido.
NHS-prescribed Hormone Replacement Therapy, or HRT, is traditionally a combination of oestrogen and progesterone. Testosterone is not routinely included.
Instead doctors can separately prescribe testosterone to female patients, at lower doses than given to men.
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There are also a myriad of menopause supplements which claim to ease symptoms including brain fog. Estimates vary but it’s a multi-billion dollar industry and its booming.
Women spend an average of £147 per year on supplements to try to alleviate their menopause symptoms, according to a survey earlier this year by the nutrition news website NutraIngredients.
“They might help a bit,” says Dr Newson.
“I do yoga every day, and that helps my brain become clear and focused, but I have a hormone deficiency, I can’t eat my way out of it, or exercise my way out of it.
“A lot of women spend a fortune trying to improve symptoms of a hormone deficiency with something else.”
Dr Joshua Chen is part of the Harvard Medical School-Massachusetts General Hospital Photobiomodulation Research Group. The team is looking at how frequencies of red light can change the mitochondria inside the brain to improve focus.
He describes it as “like a face mask, but for the brain”. It can also, he says, be applied to the Vagus nerve on the neck to reduce stress.
He has founded a company called Niraxx which markets a headband called a neuro espresso, which is designed to be worn for up to 20 minutes a day. He claims the results are instant. It has to be plugged in – there are no batteries in the device for safety reasons.
Niraxx
Angela Marsh is a registered nurse and a menopause coach. She says her clients often describe brain fog as feeling like they are “living life in soft focus”.
“I don’t think brain fog is taken seriously enough at all,” she says.
“Many women feel deeply unsettled by the changes they experience. They think there’s something wrong with them or they’re ‘losing it’ when in fact there’s a clear biological reason.”
As for me – well, I’ve booked a blood test to check my hormone levels. I’m going to try some red-light therapy. And you are probably going to see me holding notes a bit more often.
Most women will relate to the misery of inconsistent sizing in high-street shops.
A pair of jeans could easily be a size 10 by one brand and a size 14 in another, leaving customers confused and disheartened.
It has led to a global deluge of returns, costing fashion retailers an estimated £190bn a year as would-be shoppers wonder what size they’re meant to buy from which store.
I didn’t have to look far to find people experiencing the problem.
“I don’t trust high-street sizing,” one person tells me, as she browses one of London’s popular shopping streets. “To be honest, I buy by how it looks rather than the actual size.”
She’s one of many women who often orders multiple versions of the same item to find one that fits, before sending the rest back, fuelling a culture of mass returns.
A new generation of sizing tech
A growing cluster of tech companies are now attempting to fix the problem.
Tools such as 3DLook, True Fit and EasySize focus on helping customers choose the right size at checkout, using body scans via smartphone photos to suggest the most accurate fit.
Meanwhile, virtual fitting-room platforms including Google’s virtual try-on, Doji, Alta, Novus, DRESSX Agent and WEARFITS allow shoppers to create digital avatars and preview how items might look. These systems aim to increase confidence when buying online.
More recently, AI-powered shopping agents have begun entering the market too. Daydream, allows users to describe what they are looking for and then recommends options.
OneOff pulls together looks from celebrities to find similar items, while Phia scans tens of thousands of websites to compare prices and surface early “size insights.”
While these tools work at the e-commerce stage, a new UK start-up, Fit Collective, is taking a different approach: trying to prevent the problem earlier in the production process.
Founder Phoebe Gormley argues AI can potentially fix the sizing before clothes reach the stores.
The 31-year-old – who is no data scientist, rather a tailor – previously launched Savile Row’s first female tailors, making made-to-measure garments for a range of women.
“They would all come in and say, ‘high-street sizing is so bad’,” she tells me.
She says fashion’s current model is a “downward spiral” where brands make cheaper garments to offset huge return rates, which leads to unhappy customers and more waste.
Since launching last year, Fit Collective has raised £3 million in pre-seed funding, reportedly the largest amount ever secured by a solo female founder in the UK.
“As far as we know, we are the first solution comparing all the manufacturing data and the commercial data,” she says.
Phoebe’s new venture uses machine learning to analyse a range of data – including returns, sales figures and customer emails – to really understand why something didn’t fit.
It then turns this into clear advice for design and production teams, who can adjust patterns, sizing and materials before manufacturing begins.
Her system may tell a firm, for example, to take a few centimetres off the length of an item of clothing to reduce the number of returns overall. This saves money for the company and time for the consumer.
While many in the industry welcome such tools, some warn technology alone won’t fix fashion’s sizing problem.
“People aren’t mannequins, they’re unique, and so are their fit preferences,” says Paul Alger, Director of International Business at the UK Fashion and Textile Association.
He warns sizing can be nuanced, with body measurements rarely aligning with a number on a label.
“It’s very difficult, it’s very subjective,” he says.
“Most of us are a different shape and size – around the world people have different body shapes.”
And then there’s the issue of vanity sizing – or “emotional sizing” according to Mr Alger – where a brand will deliberately choose to create a more generous fit in the knowledge that a consumer, especially in women’s wear, will prefer to shop there.
“Once these sizing norms are established in a collection, brands will usually refer back to them each season so they are effectively creating their own brand sizing,” he says.
Sophie De Salis, sustainability policy adviser at the British Retail Consortium, says retailers are increasingly aware of the issue, from a cost-saving and sustainability perspective.
“Smarter sizing tech and AI-driven solutions are key to reducing returns and supporting the industry’s sustainability goals. BRC members are working with innovative tech providers to help their customers buy the most suitable size and reduce returns,” she says.
With returns now a board room issue and sustainability pressures mounting, more fashion houses may well consider data-driven design.
While no single solution is likely to solve inconsistent sizing completely, the emergence of tools like Fit Collective, alongside a growing ecosystem of virtual try-ons and size-prediction platforms, suggests the industry is beginning to shift.
The makers of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude claim to have caught hackers sponsored by the Chinese government using the tool to perform automated cyber attacks against around 30 global organisations.
Anthropic said hackers tricked the chatbot into carrying out automated tasks under the guise of carrying out cyber security research.
The company claimed in a blog post this was the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”.
But sceptics are questioning the accuracy of that claim – and the motive behind it.
Anthropic said it discovered the hacking attempts in mid-September.
Pretending they were legitimate cyber security workers, hackers gave the chatbot small automated tasks which, when strung together, formed a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign”.
Researchers at Anthropic said they had “high confidence” the people carrying out the attacks were “a Chinese state-sponsored group”.
They said humans chose the targets – large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies – but the company would not be more specific.
Hackers then built an unspecified programme using Claude’s coding assistance to “autonomously compromise a chosen target with little human involvement”.
Anthropic claims the chatbot was able to successfully breach various unnamed organisations, extract sensitive data and sort through it for valuable information.
The company said it had since banned the hackers from using the chatbot and had notified affected companies and law enforcement.
But Martin Zugec from cyber firm Bitdefender said the cyber security world had mixed feelings about the news.
“Anthropic’s report makes bold, speculative claims but doesn’t supply verifiable threat intelligence evidence,” he said.
“Whilst the report does highlight a growing area of concern, it’s important for us to be given as much information as possible about how these attacks happen so that we can assess and define the true danger of AI attacks.”
Anthropic’s announcement is perhaps the most high profile example of companies claiming bad actors are using AI tools to carry out automated hacks.
It is the kind of danger many have been worried about, but other AI companies have also claimed that nation state hackers have used their products.
In February 2024, OpenAI published a blog post in collaboration with cyber experts from Microsoft saying it had disrupted five state-affiliated actors, including some from China.
“These actors generally sought to use OpenAI services for querying open-source information, translating, finding coding errors, and running basic coding tasks,” the firm said at the time.
Anthropic has not said how it concluded the hackers in this latest campaign were linked to the Chinese government.
The Chinese embassy in the US told reporters it was not involved.
It comes as some cyber security companies have been criticised for over-hyping cases where AI was used by hackers.
Critics say the technology is still too unwieldy to be used for automated cyber attacks.
In November, cyber experts at Google released a research paper which highlighted growing concerns about AI being used by hackers to create brand new forms of malicious software.
But the paper concluded the tools were not all that successful – and were only in a testing phase.
The cyber security industry, like the AI business, is keen to say hackers are using the tech to target companies in order to boost the interest in their own products.
In its blog post, Anthropic argued that the answer to stopping AI attackers is to use AI defenders.
“The very abilities that allow Claude to be used in these attacks also make it crucial for cyber defence,” the company claimed.
And Anthropic admitted its chatbot made mistakes. For example, it made up fake login usernames and passwords and claimed to have extracted secret information which was in fact publicly available.
“This remains an obstacle to fully autonomous cyberattacks,” Anthropic said.
Valve, the company behind PC gaming platform Steam, has revealed a new console to rival Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation.
The Steam Machine is a home console designed to allow gamers to play PC games on their TV – though it can also be used as a computer.
It is a spiritual sequel to the 2014 device of the same name, which failed to break into a market dominated by the three big gaming giants.
Prices for those consoles, back then, started at $499 (£300) – but Valve’s latest iteration is expected to cost a good deal more.
The Steam Machine will go on sale in early 2026, the company said, with the pricing yet to be announced.
The company says this and more details will be provided closer to the exact release date, which is also currently unknown.
Since Valve launched Steam in 2003, it has grown to become the world’s largest distribution platform for PC gaming.
Around 25 million Steam players were online and six million were playing games at the time of writing, according to the platform’s own metrics.
But whether its new hardware can match Steam’s success will remain to be seen when the devices launch next year.
Analysts previously cast doubt on the Steam Machine’s significance when it launched in its original, clunkier form a decade ago – saying its price-tag and potential might only really entice Steam “power users”.
In a video announcement, Valve described the new console as “a powerful gaming PC in a small but mighty package”.
The firm argues the device is “optimised for gaming” over other PCs because the firm is able to say which games on its massive digital storefront will work on it before you buy.
Powered by its Linux-based SteamOS operating system and AMD graphics processors, Valve said the new Steam Machine can support 4k resolution and 60 frames per second.
But industry expert Christopher Dring said its potential and appeal may be limited, comparing it to the firm’s handheld Steam Deck console which has a “lucrative but niche” audience of “around four to five million players”.
“Most of those people were already Steam customers looking to take their PC games on-the-go,” he said.
“My feeling is the Steam Machine will be similar – this will mostly appeal to a lucrative enthusiast audience of existing Steam players who want to play their games in a living room setting.”.
In an unusual move, Valve has also announced further hardware – its Steam Frame virtual reality (VR) headset.
The device is entirely wireless – and it described it as a “streaming-first” device – but it is also itself a PC running SteamOS.
And it also claims to be bringinga technical leap forward in the VR space, with the headset displaying highest-quality graphics only in the bits of the screen a user is looks at.
With the sweeping new device announcements, Valve hopes to rival its more established competitors.
In recent years, Microsoft-owned Xbox has placed its subscription service Game Pass at the heart of its offering for gamers – some say at the expense of its console crown.
Brandon Sutton, games industry analyst at Midia research, said the announcements showed Valve’s “strong grasp of where the gaming market is headed and what gamers want”.
“With Sony and Microsoft moving away from console exclusives, and the prevalence of games streaming services, it has never been a better time for a PC-Console hybrid,” he told the BBC.
Apple has faced a wave of online mockery following its announcement of a new carrying case for its iPhone range.
The US tech giant was ridiculed after it revealed the iPhone Pocket on Tuesday would retail for £219.95, despite it being little more than a novel way to carry a mobile device.
Many took aim at the high price online, while others made fun of its striking likeness to a piece of everyday knitted footwear – with one X user calling it “$230 for a cut up sock”.
In a press release, Apple said the brightly-coloured accessory was part of a limited edition range created in collaboration with the Japanese fashion label Issey Miyake.
The late fashion designer previously worked with the tech firm to create the black turtleneck jumpers famously worn by the company’s co-founder Steve Jobs.
Apple said the product had been inspired by “a piece of cloth”, and its concept came from “the idea of creating an additional pocket”.
The bag’s short strap design will be available in eight colours, and the long strap in three colours.
The announcement drew criticism on social media, with many suggesting it showed Apple fans would “pay for anything”.
The bag’s open top and sock-like structure also caught flak, with one X user saying: “no zip, no structure and considering how many thefts of iPhones there are these days… no security?”
And some even posted tongue-in-cheek pictures of the actor Sasha Baron Cohen as the fictional character Borat, suggesting the product bore similarity to his bright green mankini.
But others came to its defence, pointing out the price could be because of the collaboration with Issey Miyake, calling it “a nod to the history of Apple”.
Social media consultant and analyst Matt Navara told the BBC the price tag looked to be less about “function” but more about “form, branding and exclusivity”.
“This kind of pricing is not new in the world of luxury fashion or designer collabs,” he said.
“But for most consumers, it feels like Apple is testing the limits of brand loyalty.”
The UK government will allow tech firms and child safety charities to proactively test artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make sure they cannot create child sexual abuse imagery.
An amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill announced on Wednesday would enable “authorised testers” to assess models for their ability to generate illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) prior to their release.
Technology secretary Liz Kendall said the measures would “ensure AI systems can be made safe at the source” – though some campaigners argue more still needs to be done.
It comes as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said the number of AI-related CSAM reports had doubled over the past year.
The charity, one of only a few in the world licensed to actively search for child abuse content online, said it had removed 426 pieces of reported material between January and October 2025.
This was up from 199 over the same period in 2024, it said.
Its chief executive Kerry Smith welcomed the government’s proposals, saying they would build on its longstanding efforts to combat online CSAM.
“AI tools have made it so survivors can be victimised all over again with just a few clicks, giving criminals the ability to make potentially limitless amounts of sophisticated, photorealistic child sexual abuse material,” she said.
“Today’s announcement could be a vital step to make sure AI products are safe before they are released.”
Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at children’s charity, the NSPCC, welcomed the measures for encouraging firms to have more accountability and scrutiny over their models and child safety.
“But to make a real difference for children, this cannot be optional,” she said.
“Government must ensure that there is a mandatory duty for AI developers to use this provision so that safeguarding against child sexual abuse is an essential part of product design.”
‘Ensuring child safety’
The government said its proposed changes to the law would also equip AI developers and charities to make sure AI models have adequate safeguards around extreme pornography and non-consensual intimate images.
Child safety experts and organisations have frequently warned AI tools developed, in part, using huge volumes of wide-ranging online content are being used to create highly realistic abuse imagery of children or non-consenting adults.
Some, including the IWF and child safety charity Thorn, have said these risk jeopardising efforts to police such material by making it difficult to identify whether such content is real or AI-generated.
Earlier this year, the Home Office said the UK would be the first country in the world to make it illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools designed to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with a punishment of up to five years in prison.
Ms Kendall said on Wednesday that “by empowering trusted organisations to scrutinise their AI models, we are ensuring child safety is designed into AI systems, not bolted on as an afterthought”.
“We will not allow technological advancement to outpace our ability to keep children safe,” she said.
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said the measures would also “mean legitimate AI tools cannot be manipulated into creating vile material and more children will be protected from predators as a result”.
A woman, said by police to have bought cryptocurrency now worth billions of pounds using funds stolen from thousands of Chinese pensioners, is due to be sentenced this week for money laundering.
After fleeing China, she moved to a mansion in Hampstead, north London. The Metropolitan Police raided it a year later and made one of the world’s single largest crypto seizures.
More than 100,000 Chinese people invested their money in her company – which claimed to be developing high-tech health products and mining cryptocurrency. In reality, she embezzled the funds, police say. As she awaits sentencing, investors have told the BBC World Service they hope to get at least some of their cash back from the UK authorities.
Anything left unclaimed would normally default to the UK government – leading some to speculate that the Treasury could stand to gain from the haul.
“If we can gather all the evidence together, we hope the UK government, the Crown Prosecution Service and the High Court can show compassion,” said one victim we are calling Mr Yu, who says his marriage failed as a result of the fraud. “Because now, it’s only that haul of Bitcoin [cryptocurrency] that can return us a little bit of what we lost.”
She moved into a mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath, at a rent of more than £17,000 ($22,700) a month. To pay for this, she needed to convert her Bitcoin stash back into money she could spend.
So she posed as a wealthy antiques and diamond heiress, and hired a former takeaway worker as her personal assistant, who she asked to trade the cryptocurrency into other assets, such as cash and property.
Metropolitan Police
As Bitcoin rocketed in value, Qian could achieve what her company promised its investors – that they could “get rich while lying down”. Her assistant Wen Jian – at her own trial last year, which culminated in a six-year jail term for money laundering – said Qian had spent most of her days lying in bed, gaming and online shopping.
But Qian was also drawing up a bold six-year plan for future schemes, according to her diary. Her notes outline plans to found an international bank, buy a Swedish castle, and even to ingratiate herself with a British duke.
Her grander stated objective was to become queen of Liberland, an unrecognised microstate on the Croatian-Serbian border, by 2022.
In the meantime, Qian had Wen look for houses she could buy in London. But her attempts to purchase an especially large property in Totteridge Common – an area known for its substantial, secluded residences – triggered a police investigation when Wen was unable to account for her boss’s wealth.
Police raided Qian’s Hampstead rental property and uncovered hard drives and laptops found to be loaded with tens of thousands of Bitcoin – believed to be the single largest cryptocurrency seizure in UK history.
Qian had set up the company through which money was embezzled just four years earlier, in her native China. Lantian Gerui, or Bluesky Greet in English, claimed to use investors’ money to mine – or generate – new Bitcoin, and to invest in a range of pioneering technological devices.
But UK police believe this was an elaborate scam, and that Qian’s company was simply using promises of high profits to pull more and more investors into the scheme.
“The more information we got about her involvement… that she was actually the leader of the fraud, not just a lower down member… it became obvious that yes she’s very clever, she’s very switched on, very manipulative, able to persuade a lot of people,” Det Con Joe Ryan from the Met told the BBC.
One of her investors, Mr Yu, says he never suspected anything was wrong because the company drip-fed him a portion of his apparent earnings – just over 100 yuan ($14, £10) – every day.
“That made everyone feel really good, it even gave us the confidence to borrow a little more to invest in the company,” he says.
He and his wife had initially invested 60,000 yuan ($8,429, £6,295) each. They were told, he says, they would make a 200% profit over two and a half years. They were soon taking out thousands of pounds’ worth of loans at interest rates of up to 8%, in order to invest more.
In addition, Mr Yu reinvested his daily payouts back into the company as soon as he received them.
“There was no rule that you had to reinvest your earnings, but I suppose we were just too weak to resist. They just pumped up our dreams… until we lost all self-control, all critical judgment.”
Chinese social media
Investors saw their daily payouts topped up for each new person they signed up. This helped the scam reach some 120,000 people, based in every one of China’s provinces, according to documents from trials in China of the company’s official promoters. Their deposits totalled more than 40bn yuan ($5.6bn, £4.2bn), the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has found.
A former company employee later testified that it was new investors’ money that had been funding the daily payouts, not crypto-mining dividends.
Lantian Gerui’s marketing exploited the loneliness of many middle-aged and elderly Chinese. Qian wrote poems about social responsibility, with lines such as: “We must love the elderly with the infatuation of a first romance.”
The company also organised mass holidays and banquets for current and potential investors. These were used to promote yet more investment opportunities – slideshows and card machines at the ready.
Lantian Gerui also trumpeted its love of China as a nation, another ploy calculated to appeal to the elderly.
“Our patriotism was our Achilles’ heel, that’s what they exploited,” says Mr Yu, who is in his 60s. “They said that they wanted to make China number one in the world.”
A range of speakers endorsed the company, including the son-in-law of the late Chairman Mao, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China – Mr Yu said.
“We in our generation all looked up to Chairman Mao, so if even his son-in-law was vouching for it, how could we not trust it?”
The company even held an event in the Great Hall of the People, where China’s legislature meets, according to an investor who attended the event and two others we spoke to.
“That bunch of [promoters], they’d take something red and persuade you it was white, take something black and convince you it was red,” Mr Yu says.
Despite leading this high-profile enterprise, Qian was notoriously secretive, known only as Huahua or Little Flower to her clients, and communicating with them largely through the poems she posted on her blog.
But she would emerge for the biggest investors – those who put in at least 6m yuan ($842,000, £628,000) – inviting them to more intimate events, according to one of these clients, Mr Li.
“Those of us present, you could say that we were starstruck,” he remembers. “We all saw her as our Goddess of Wealth.
“She started encouraging us to dream big… that within three years, she’d give us enough wealth to last our families three generations.”
Mr Li, his wife, and his brother, invested some 10m yuan ($1.3m, £1m) between them.
Alamy
A Chinese police investigation into Lantian Gerui, launched in mid-2017, signalled the beginning of the end for Qian’s scheme.
“The payouts suddenly stopped,” Mr Yu recalls. “The company said the police were doing some checks… though we were promised that payments would resume soon enough.”
What helped the investors initially keep calm, he says, was company managers’ reassurance that this was just a temporary blip, urging them not to approach the police.
What he later discovered through the Chinese court cases, he says, is that Qian had paid off those senior managers to assuage investors’ concerns – while she fled to the UK with the money.
Qian was not entirely oblivious to the plight of her investors – she outlined a plan in her diary to pay back her debts in China, once the price of Bitcoin had reached £50,000 per coin. But her diary makes clear that her priority was to rule and develop Liberland, earmarking millions of pounds for this project.
When she was finally arrested in York, in the north of England, last April, police also found four other people at the house, Southwark Crown Court heard at the start of her sentencing hearing on Monday. All four had been brought to the UK specifically to work for Qian in roles such as shopping, cleaning and security – and were employed illegally, the court was told.
At the time of her arrest, Qian denied all charges, claiming she was simply fleeing a Chinese government crackdown on crypto entrepreneurs, and disputing evidence presented by the Chinese police. But then, at her trial in September, she unexpectedly pleaded guilty to illegally acquiring and possessing the cryptocurrency.
Mr Li told the BBC this offered victims a “glimpse of sunlight”.
The cryptocurrency Qian brought to the UK has multiplied more than 20 times in value since her arrival. Its fate will be decided by a civil “proceeds of crime” case that will start in earnest early next year.
There are thousands of Chinese investors planning to make a claim in this case, say lawyers from two firms representing victims. But this will not be easy, one of them – a Chinese lawyer who asked to remain anonymous – told us. They will need to prove their claim – and in many cases they did not transfer money to Qian’s company directly, but to accounts of local promoters who then passed the cash up the chain.
It is not clear whether the victims, if successful, will receive only their original investment, or an inflated amount which reflects Bitcoin’s subsequent rise in value.
As in other “proceeds of crime” cases, any money left over after this process would normally default to the UK government. The BBC asked the UK Treasury what it plans to do with any remaining money, but it did not respond.
Separately, last month, the CPS said it was considering a compensation scheme for those with no representation in the civil case. We asked the CPS what level of evidence this alternative scheme would require, but it told us it was not able to share any details at this stage.
The toll on Mr Yu – whose wife invested alongside him – has not just been financial, but personal, culminating in divorce and little contact with his son, he told the BBC.
Still, he considers himself relatively lucky. One lawyer we spoke to said many of Qian’s investors were left without money for food or medicine.
Mr Yu knew one such person – from Tianjin, northern China. She died of breast cancer after discharging herself from hospital, unable to afford treatment, he said.
“She was at death’s door, and she knew I could write, so she asked me to write her an elegy if the worst came to the worst.”
Mr Yu says he kept his word and wrote a poem in her memory which he posted online. It ends with the lines:
“Let us be pillars, holding up the sky / Rather than sheep, to be led and misled / To those who survive – strive harder / That we might right this grave injustice.”
China has lifted export controls on computer chips vital to car production, the country’s commerce ministry said on Sunday.
Exemptions have been granted to exports made by Chinese-owned Nexperia for civilian use, it said, which should help carmakers who had feared production in Europe would be hit.
At the same time, China has also paused an export ban to the US of some materials that are crucial in the semiconductor industry.
The announcement marks an easing of trade tensions between Beijing and Washington after President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump agreed in October to reduce tariffs on each other and pause other measures for a year.
In October, the Dutch government took control of Nexperia, which is based in the Netherlands but owned by Chinese company Wingtech, to try to safeguard the European supply of semiconductors for cars and other goods.
In response, China blocked exports of the firm’s finished chips. However, it said earlier this month it would begin easing the ban as part of a trade deal struck between the US and China.
While Nexperia is based in the Netherlands, about 70% of its chips made in Europe are sent to China to be completed and re-exported to other countries.
When it took control of the company, the Dutch government said it had taken the decision due to “serious governance shortcomings” and to prevent the company’s chips from becoming unavailable in an emergency.
But when China blocked exports of chips from Nexperia, there were worries that it could create global supply chain issues.
In October, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (EMEA) had warned Nexperia chip supplies would only last a few weeks unless the Chinese ban was lifted.
Earlier this month, the EMEA’s director general Sigrid De Vries told the BBC that “supply shortages were imminent”.
Volvo Cars and Volkswagen had warned that a chip shortage could lead to temporary shutdowns at their plants, and Jaguar Land Rover also said the lack of chips posed a threat to its business.
But on Saturday, EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic announced in a post on X that China had agreed to “the further simplification of export procedures for Nexperia chips” and it would “grant exemption from licensing requirements to any exporter” provided the goods were for “civilian use”.
“Close engagement with both the Chinese and Dutch authorities continues as we work towards a lasting. stable predictable framework that ensures the full restoration of semiconductor flows.”
In its statement, China’s commerce ministry called on “the EU to continue exerting its influence to urge the Netherlands to correct its erroneous practices as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile, the suspension of a ban on exports of “dual-use items” related to gallium, germanium, antimony and super-hard materials to the US came into effect on Sunday and will be in place until 27 November, 2026.
The ban on the exports of goods and materials that can have both civilian and military uses was announced in December 2024.
On Friday, China also announced the suspension of other export controls related to expanded curbs on some rare earth materials and lithium batteries.
