The curious case of Guren “Bobby” Zhou shows the ease with which investors with shady backgrounds and unknown motivations can funnel money to the president.

During the World Cup soccer final in New Jersey last month, Zach Witkoff, co-founder of President Trump’s cryptocurrency company, took in the action from a luxury suite. Joining him was a man who had made the president, and all the company’s co-founders, much richer.

Two years earlier, the man, Guren “Bobby” Zhou, was a failed hardwood flooring retailer in Britain who had come under investigation there for money laundering and presided over the collapse of a small crypto start-up.

Then seemingly out of nowhere, he became one of the biggest buyers of tokens from Mr. Trump’s company, World Liberty Financial, dropping a total of $100 million through a new firm called Aqua 1. He kept quiet about it for months, other than speaking briefly as “Mr. Bobby” from Aqua 1 during a little-noticed audio stream on X.

“We’re very proud to be a major player in the World Liberty, which is Trump’s family’s crypto venture,” he said.

Under World Liberty policy, as much as $75 million of that money was distributed to a company controlled by the president and his three sons. The money also benefited the family of Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special peace envoy and the father of Zach Witkoff.

In any prior era, a windfall for the president of that size from a foreigner with no public signs of access to that level of wealth would have certainly gone against norms and might have spawned a congressional investigation.