From China to Rome with fury. Jianwu Li, better known as Franco Lee, had been on track since 2021. He presented himself on Instagram and Telegram as a Bitcoin “guru”, a crypto wizard capable of moving 8 million 800 thousand euros in three years, receiving a commission included between 5% and 10% for each transaction and he made more than 3000. A lot of money which according to the carabinieri, coordinated by the deputy prosecutors Giuseppe Cascini and Giovanni Conzo, would be “dirty”. It is no coincidence at all that investigators and investigators who studied Franco Lee’s moves yesterday carried out the largest seizure of cryptocurrencies carried out to date by the military in Italy. A seizure of over half a million euros. Not only that, because the accusations against him are serious and the investigations will continue.
Who is Franco Lee
Franco Lee had defined himself as the ‘Centralized Bankmobile’. Residing partly in the Tintoretto area and partly in Frascati, 56 years old, during an interview on social media, given to the ‘Investitori Folli’ channel on the occasion of the Blockchain Week in Rome, he presented himself with a confident manner. He gave business cards and said: “I am also a decentralized promoter”, an untrue qualification given that – among the accusations – there is also that of “illegal exercise of financial activity and offering of investment services to the public”.
On why he took cash and transformed it, not to say “cleaned it”, into cryptocurrencies, Franco Lee was clear: “The world needs to be freer. I’m not against paying taxes. But I don’t agree with the fact that we don’t control who pays. Who spends in a non-transparent way, that there is no public waste, that there is no bureaucracy”, he reiterated, speaking almost as a politician. “All the managers are there doing nothing. We have to work like this to pay taxes and make them enjoy life. With Bitcoins, with cryptocurrencies, we are freer. You are the master of your assets . Money, banknotes, today are toilet paper”, almost challenging the so-called strong powers.
Franco Lee’s system
Hidden between the words “guru”, however, according to those who investigated him there was much more. In fact, the analysis revealed that Franco Lee has moved almost nine million euros since 2021, through approximately 3 thousand movements and exchanges.
A trading activity between cash and cryptocurrencies that was carried out in the total absence of any control required by anti-money laundering legislation and without the necessary authorizations, guaranteeing customers anonymity in exchange for significantly higher commissions than those of authorized exchanges, which they charge fees up to 100 times lower. The pact, according to investigators, was clear: whoever gave him the cash paid silence but in exchange obtained clean cryptocurrencies.
The services offered by Franco Lee, despite the commissions charged fluctuating between 5% and 10%, were in great demand. “From this it is clear that the interested parties, in order to guarantee anonymity and the absence of controls, accept commissions of this size, when by directly investing with official operators in the cryptocurrency sector they would limit the commissions due to 0.1%”, yes reads in the ordinance that reconstructed the maneuvers of the “guru”.
Where the money came from
But who gave the cash, a lot of it, to Franco Lee? Symptomatic, in this sense, would have been a phone call from Lee in which he expressly stated that he had collaborated in investments in virtual currency on behalf of people from certain areas of Rome who the “guru” knew were drug dealers, an element which “found circumstantial confirmation thanks to the observation of the meeting carried out as an investment with a subject burdened by a police record regarding drugs”, explained the investigating judge of Rome who signed the order.
Furthermore, according to investigative sources heard by RomaToday, Lee also cleaned up money on behalf of those who carried out online scams and also on behalf of other pushers. A sort of crypto washing machine because, as those who investigated underlined, “you can’t imagine one person moving all that money alone”.
The Chinese specialize in recycling
Now the investigations will continue to understand who and how many people turned to Franco Lee to clean up their dirty money. Certainly the operation called ‘Lotus’ once again demonstrates the reliability and ability of the Chinese in Rome to “wash” money. Last year, an investigation by the financial police made it possible to reconstruct the movements of Zheng Wen Kui, born in 1968, who Roman drug dealers called ‘Chinese Luca’.
In the physical shops of via Filippo Turati, via Napoleone III, those in the Chinatown of the Esquiline capital, the ‘Chinese Luca’ group offered a parallel banking service that managed to send money abroad by cleaning it. “Washing machines” whose customers were the ghota of the Narcos of Rome. All thanks to the “flying money” technique, better known as ‘Fei ch’ien’, described in this article in the Dossier section of RomaToday.
