A Chinese crypto queen has been sentenced to jail in London for laundering billions in stolen Bitcoin.
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
A German court has ruled that OpenAI's chatbot used song lyrics without permission, and Japan's SoftBank cashes out of NVIDIA.
Yes, a Chinese woman has been sentenced in London for her role in a Bitcoin scam worth billions of dollars.
Chiang Ki-min was convicted of trying to launder more than 60000 Bitcoins, now worth around 65 billion, following Britain's largest ever seizure of cryptocurrency.
More than 100,000 people across China invested.
A man we are calling Mr Yu, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity, took out loans and invested everything into the company.
For a while, he was getting daily returns, but then in 2017, it all came crashing down.
We were just too weak to resist.
They just pumped up our dreams until we lost all self-control, all critical judgment.
Many families have been broken up.
People have been left without money to pay for medical treatments.
All this has really happened.
Our correspondent Nick Johnson is outside the court for us today.
Nick, what happened?
Well, this afternoon, Ximing Chan was jailed for 11 years and eight months.
You heard in that clip that 2017 it all came crashing down for those people who thought they were getting their money's worth in terms of investments.
In 2017, Chan fled China and she ended up in the UK, where she continued to live a very lavish lifestyle, spending those ill-gotten gains, that cryptocurrency, that Bitcoin, which was growing in value rapidly.
We've heard about her buying of designer clothes, shoes, jewellery.
We heard her spending £100,000 in Harrods in London within the space of three months.
She was eventually traced by police in the UK after a suspicious activity when she was trying to buy a high-value property in London.
Police then got involved, but it took them seven years to eventually arrest her.
After they were arrested, they found laptops with digital wallets containing somewhere around 61 000 bitcoins which, as you say, in today's money is probably worth about six and a half billion US dollars.
It's the single at the moment, the single largest seizure of cryptocurrency in the world, certainly the largest in the UK and the largest money laundering operation to happen in the UK so far.
It's outstanding.
And there's thousands of Chinese investors.
They lost their savings in the scheme.
What's been said about whether they'll get any of that money back?
Well, we heard in court from the judge.
He said that the Bitcoin that was fortunately gained by Tian has gained so much that there should be more than enough to recompense people in China.
But that will be a decision for the Chinese authorities.
And certainly the Home Office here in the UK won't be drawn yet on how the Bitcoin seized is going to be used and what's going to happen to it.
But it is a significant amount of money.
And the and the judge said, today talked about how sophisticated Qian was in terms of her offending.
Yeah, absolutely.
Nick Johnson outside the court for us today.
Thank you so much.
And if you'd like to hear more, please search for the Chinese Crypto Queen on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
We've got Fiona Sincotta, Senior Markets Analyst at Citi Index with us.
Now at the same time as this story now completely separate, but we're actually seeing chaos in crypto right now.
Bitcoin has fallen sharply again.
So what's driving that volatility, Fiona?
Yeah, I mean.
Crypto has fallen quite drastically around 20 from its record high of 126000 just last month to current levels of just over 100000.
Several reasons there.
There's a cautious mood since October the 19th, when the crypto market experienced a huge wipeout to the region of around 20 billion of leveraged positions.
So that's investors that had borrowed money to speculate.
Also, we've seen institutional demand has fallen, with 122 billion worth of Bitcoin outflows last week.
And corporate demand is also much weaker than it has been.
OK, Fiona, stay right there.
OpenAI has been ordered to pay damages in Germany for using copyrighted song lyrics to train its artificial intelligence.
A court in Munich ruled that ChatGPT reproduced lines from well-known German songs without permission.
OpenAI had denied that it stored or copied specific data.
The case was brought by the music rights group GEMA, which represents more than 100000 composers, lyricists and publishers.
Its chief executive is Dr Tobias Hosmuller.
Basically, we were able to prove that OpenAI not only trained on the data, but stored these lyrics that are written by our members permanently in the model.
And the model reproduced these lyrics when users typed in simple prompts such as you know, give me those lyrics for this and that song.
So basically, they were acting like a database of song lyrics where you could withdraw all the lyrics that you would request from the language model.
That was Dr. Tobias Hosmuller, CEO of the music rights group GEMA.
Japan's SoftBank, that's a tech investment group that backs some of the world's biggest startups.
It sold its entire stake in the American chipmaker NVIDIA.
Fiona Sincotta, and coming back to you on this, I mean, I'm not an investor.
I mean, like I probably shouldn't be because NVIDIA has been doing so well lately.
I'm like, why would they make this move?
It's a very good question.
I mean, they sold 32 million shares in NVIDIA.
That's the entire holding.
Did it in the same quarter that SoftBank reported a net profit of $16.2 billion, so solid earnings.
But basically they're saying they need the money for other investments, other projects ranging from the Stargate data center to AI robot manufacturing, but also a huge investment into OpenAI.
That's the company behind ChatGPT.
And it's interesting because this all comes at a time where there really is this growing debate over the huge spending by tech firms into AI and whether that will bring decent returns.
We will not know.
And I wouldn't know.
Definitely not, Fiona.
Fiona Sincada, thank you so much.
India's capital Delhi, is choking under some of the world's worst air pollution, which has forced a ban on non-essential construction and limits on factories using dirty fuels.
Officials say the smog has worsened by widespread crop burning as farmers cleared their fields for the next planting season.
Over the weekend, residents took to the streets demanding tougher action, as the city's toxic air threatens both public health and productivity.
The UN Climate Conference COP30, is underway in Brazil's Amazon region, and there's been renewed calls to step up the fight against global warming.
But deep divisions remain as major oil producers like Saudi Arabia resist efforts to phase out fossil fuels.
And for farmers like Phoebe Mongangi in eastern Kenya, the impact is already clear.
Droughts and failed rains threatening her crops and her livelihood.
The yields have gone down.
The livestock are dreaded.
They are not producing.
They are dying because of drought.
And economically, we are defacitated as women because that is our livelihood.
As a group of women farmers, we have come up with innovations like rainwater harvesting where we're going to harvest the water, hold it into reservoirs.
We're also using zipits.
These are sort of holes where we will dig and hold the water when the rain is coming.
And also we have the rip lines where water is going to be held and we shall have minimal soil disturbance.
That was farmer Fibe Mungangi in eastern Kenya.
On the next edition of World Business Report, its podcast.
You'll hear from South Africa's environment minister, who's at the COP summit in Brazil.
And before I go, here's one for your diary.
Japan is set to open its first Pokémon theme park in February.
The Pokémon Wonder Park in Osaka will feature interactive games, rides and digital creatures brought to life through augmented reality.
It's another move to cash in on Japan's billion-dollar gaming industry and draw tourists ahead of the 2025 World Expo.
And that's it from World Business Express with me, Leanna Byrne.
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