The National Crime Agency has laid bare the growing influence of Chinese gangsters by warning they are now the most dangerous foreign criminals operating in Britain.
The NCA reveal in a new report that mobsters from the country currently pose the biggest foreign organised crime threat to the UK, a conclusion that even experts admit has taken them by surprise.
Chinese criminals play a significant role across a vast swathe of Britain’s criminal underworld, including drug smuggling, human trafficking, modern slavery, fraud and cyber crime – the agency warns in its 2025 National Strategic Assessment.
They also pointed to the ‘increasing’ influence of Chinese money launderers, who are widely used by British crooks after honing their skills helping compatriots evade China’s strict currency controls to illicitly move money to the UK.
They include ‘Bitcoin queen’ Jian Wen, 42, a one-time London takeaway worker earning £5,979-a-year, who was found in possession of £3billion worth of crypto from an investment scam carried out in China between 2014 and 2017.
Another rare insight into this shadow world came with the jailing of a seven-strong gang who laundered £55m as part of a ‘shadow banking’ network specifically targeted at international university students.
Professor Anthony Glees, a security and intelligence expert from the University of Buckingham, told he was ‘surprised’ by the NCA’s finding that Chinese gangs now represent the UK’s biggest overseas organised crime threat.
‘What it shows is that the experts who are paid to go into this kind of stuff in granular detail understand the danger that they pose,’ he said.
‘A lot of people would have thought that enemy number one was Russia, but for the people who look in the nooks and crannies it’s the Chinese. That’s their assessment and it’s very alarming.’
Asked to explain the ability of Chinese gangsters to infiltrate Britain’s underworld, Professor Glees claimed they benefitted from a permissive environment fostered by President Xi’s regime.
‘The Chinese government won’t mind about this – they want us to be weakened and poorer,’ he said.
In its report, the NCA said that it was ‘highly likely’ that Chinese criminals based in China or other countries, including the UK, ‘pose the biggest non-British serious organised crime threat to the UK’.
The agency warned that the ‘already high threat from Chinese-speaking money laundering networks in the UK’ was growing.
Explaining their ability to successfully compete against rival launderers from other hostile states such as Russia, it noted that Chinese groups had become renowned for their ‘competitive and rapid service’.
Their growth has been aided by rules that ban citizens from sending more than $50,000 (£38,000) out of China for personal purposes each year.
While citizens are meant to send all transactions through a foreign exchange account opened with a registered bank, many circumvent this limit by using ‘underground banking’.
The ability of these criminals to secretly move money across borders has been seized upon by UK street gangs, who use it to disguise the origin of funds made from drug dealing.
High Street shops, including cash-heavy businesses like restaurants, takeaways and nail salons, have long been popular among criminal networks seeking to clean dirty cash.
In one operation recently exposed in Ireland, Chinese criminals used an Asian restaurant in Dublin as a drop-off point where Irish gangsters could leave their money to wash through bank accounts or the purchase of luxury goods.
The vast profits on offer are inevitably the prime attraction to would-be launderers, who are often able to enjoy lavish lifestyles by taking a commission on any money passing through their hands.
In the case of Jian Wen, this included moving into a £5million six-bedroom Hampstead mansion – for which she paid £17,000-a-month in rent – driving a £25,000 E-Class Mercedes and spending £30,000 a month in Harrods.
She also sent her son to £6,000-a-term Heathside prep school and enjoyed lavish holidays to Germany, Rome, Zurich, Norway, Thailand, China and Japan, where she saw the sights under the guise of a jewellery business owner trading in diamonds and antiques.
The single mother made her fortune by washing dirty money for Yadi Zhang, also known as Zhimin Qian, who fled to the UK in 2017 after ripping off 128,000 investors in China.
It was only when she tried to acquire a £23million London home that alarm bells rang in the UK when she failed to pass money-laundering checks. She is currently in jail serving a six-year sentence.
Unlike cyber criminals from Russia or drug-peddlers from Albania, Chinese gangs operating in Britain have rarely hit the headlines.
A recent wave of attacks on homes using red paint is one exception, with the bizarre crimewave originally thought to be part of a coordinated protest before the finger was pointed at Chinese criminals.
Properties across England have been vandalised and spray-painted with the word ‘brothel’ during more than a dozen mysterious nighttime attacks over the last year and a half.
Oliver Chan, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Birmingham, later suggested the attacks were carried out by gangsters attempting to intimidate rivals running brothels or people in debt to loan sharks.
One area that has received significant attention is the role of China-based companies in the manufacture of small boat engines used by cross-Channel smugglers.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy vowed to target the firms responsible as part of a new ‘world first’ sanctions regime announced earlier this year.
Sturdier, rigid-hulled vessels with proper engines have almost entirely been phased out by people smugglers in favour of bigger, flimsier craft with one small outboard engine.
The issue is of such concern to ministers that it was a topic of conversation with Chinese officials at this week’s Organised Immigration Crime Summit in London, understands.
But the flow of illicit goods goes in the other direction too, with organised criminals making use of the vast Chinese market to dispose of stolen goods.
These include mobile phones, which are swiped by street-level gangs in the UK and shipped in huge numbers to warehouses in southern China where they are broken down into parts, reassembled and sold to locals at knock-down prices.
Shenzhen is located in the south of China next to the border with Hong Kong. Known as the country’s ‘Silicon Valley’ due to its expertise in electronics, it is also home to large retail outlets selling used consumer goods.
Many stolen phones have been tracked to Huaqiang South Road, a route lined by warehouses with a dock at one end.
It is a further reminder of the increasingly globalised nature of the organised criminal networks that, like large legitimate companies, will operate anywhere there is money to be made.