LOS ANGELES — A California realtor accused of spying on the family of Taiwan’s leader for Beijing also coordinated underground banking transfers from China into the United States, according to an FBI declaration obtained by The Bureau. Her alleged surveillance partner’s business, meanwhile, leads to a house identified in a separate federal investigation as a cash drop for a Chinese laundering organization working with the Sinaloa Cartel.
A CBS News investigation has traced a further connection through that partner’s business circle to an alleged enforcer for Cambodia’s Prince Group — the criminal enterprise whose dealings with Chinese security officials The Bureau examined in June.
Taken together, the records bring a familiar pattern into sharper focus.
The Bureau’s investigations into the Vancouver Model have followed the overlap between underground finance, property wealth, organized crime and Chinese state interests. In the California case, the FBI alleges that one woman was involved in both clandestine surveillance for Chinese officials and unlicensed international money transfers. Separate reporting places her associate’s commercial relationships within reach of two major transnational crime investigations.
Wanying “Heather” Zhang, 34, of Irvine, was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on October 4 as she prepared to board a one-way flight to Shanghai. A criminal complaint filed the day before charges her with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. It alleges that in September 2025 she and a companion, identified only as Individual 1, staked out the Seattle-area home of the son of Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, at the direction of two officials the FBI describes as working for the Chinese government.
In a sworn declaration filed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Kevin Holt wrote that Zhang’s WhatsApp and iMessage texts show she “appears to coordinate the unlicensed transfer of money from the People’s Republic of China to the United States.”
The profits, he wrote, “total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars” and appear to have been deposited into Chinese bank accounts. Zhang sent at least $190,000 to Chinese bank accounts as part of the scheme in 2024 and 2025, according to the declaration, and the scheme has continued since.
Holt said he believes Zhang has significant financial resources available to her in China.
“I also came to this conclusion based upon defendant’s conversations about her investment in a nightclub in Shanghai,” he wrote.
Holt also wrote that Zhang was “still engaged in a romantic relationship with Individual 1.”
Zhang is married to another man, a fellow real estate agent, and has young children, according to the New York Post. At her detention hearing, her lawyers cited those family ties in Irvine in arguing that she was not a flight risk.
Agents searching Zhang’s home found paperwork showing she graduated first in her class from the University of International Relations in Beijing. The complaint describes the university as closely affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, which it says “recruits heavily” there.
The Bureau reported last week that the surveillance case also ran through Southern California real estate. Nicholas Eftimiades, a former American intelligence official whose 34-year government career included the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, found that the Seattle rental-car paperwork listed Individual 1’s address on Walnut Avenue in Arcadia.
The FBI affidavit says Individual 1 sold a house at that address on or about September 11, 2025. Searching property records, Eftimiades found only one sale on the street in that period: a residence of about $4 million, with Zhang as the listing agent.
A man named Fatai Miao may be linked to that property, Eftimiades reported.
CBS confirmed Individual 1 as Fatai Miao, 54, a construction entrepreneur. According to CBS, Miao is the registered agent of Yuanjin Development & Construction LLC, registered at a $4.5 million house on Interstellar Street in Irvine.
In a 2023 criminal complaint reviewed by CBS, prosecutors alleged that house was a stash house for a Chinese money laundering organization working with the Sinaloa Cartel. A DEA task force officer described watching a member of the group deliver a weighted tote bag to the property in March 2023. He believed it contained illicit cash.
The Justice Department accused the group of running an unlicensed currency exchange that laundered millions for the cartel. A 2024 indictment charged 24 members. Miao was not named or charged in that case and has not been charged with any crime.
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CBS followed the corporate trail further.
Miao’s partner in Yuanjin Development, Cheng Zhang, co-manages a separate California company with a firm controlled by Chen Sokly. Reporters have identified Sokly as the unnamed Co-Conspirator-2 in the New York indictment against Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi.
