‘Bling Empire’s Kelly Mi Li and Her Ex Had to Pay Government “Like $168 Million”
Updated Feb. 8 2021, 10:55 a.m. ET
In a recent Distractify interview, Bling Empire star Kelly Mi Li mentioned her ex-husband was a man who “committed one of the biggest cyber scams in American history,” and she elaborated on that dramatic chapter of her life in the first episode of the Netflix reality show and elsewhere in the media.
“[With] my ex-husband, everything was always great, like he wanted to please me,” she told Bustle recently. “Underneath, he was building resentment or doing other things behind my back.”
Read on to learn more about Kelly’s past marriage …
Of her ex-husband, Kelly says she “didn’t even know who [she] was sleeping next to.”
“In my twenties, I was married to a Chinese guy, and we lived in a privileged, outrageous lifestyle,” Kelly explained on the show’s premiere. “You know, seven cars, four houses. I think at the time we were spending, like, 400k a month on our black [American Express card] until one day [when] the government showed up and took everything from us, and my ex-husband was arrested.”
She went on: “I didn’t know it at the time, but he was running one of the largest cyber scams in American history. All of our assets were frozen, and we gave the government, I think it was, like, $168 million. Yeah. I didn’t even know who I was sleeping next to.”
Kelly's ex-husband was involved in a “multimillion-dollar text messaging consumer fraud scheme,” according to the show.
As Kelly talked about her ex-husband on the show, viewers see flashes of press releases from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York about a multimillion-dollar text messaging consumer fraud scheme.
In May 2015, the office announced the unsealing of a criminal complaint “charging Lin Miao, Yong Jason Lee, a.k.a. ‘Jason Lee,’ Michael Pearse, Yongchao Liu, a.k.a. ‘Kevin Liu,’ Michael Pajaczkowski, a.k.a. ‘Paj,’ and Christopher Goff with participating in a scheme to charge mobile phone customers tens of millions of dollars in monthly fees for unsolicited, recurring text messages."
These text message were about "topics such as horoscopes, celebrity gossip, and trivia facts, without the customers’ knowledge or consent — a practice the defendants referred to as ‘auto-subscribing.’”
In July 2016, three more defendants were charged in the case, as the office announced at the time: Fraser Thompson, Eugeni Tsvetnenko, also known as “Zhenya”; and Francis Assifuah, also known as “Francis Assif.”
Between September 2017 and May 2018, the office announced prison sentences for four of those defendants: Assifuah was sentenced to 33 months in prison, Thompson was sentenced to five years, Goff was sentenced to 30 months, and Wedd was sentenced to 10 years.
Kelly has since moved on with actor Andrew Gray.
Before detailing the drama with her ex-husband, Kelly told viewers about her then-current relationship with Power Rangers Megaforce actor Andrew Gray.
“I moved to Los Angeles for two reasons: One, is to run away from a boy. Two, is to chase a boy,” she said. “Andrew is an actor. He’s most known for being the red Power Ranger. It’s such a shame that he had a helmet on most of the show because, I mean, look at him. Andrew is very passionate. He is half-Latin, half-Native American. And plus, he has a great heart. He’s very honest. [With] a lot of my past relationships, trust has always been an issue.”