Related: Largest ‘illicit online marketplace’ has grown 51% in 6 months: EllipticThe marketplace provided services to crypto scammers, including money laundering, stolen personal data used for pig butchering scams, telecommunications infrastructure and equipment, deepfake software and IDs, and even physical restraint devices used in scam call center compounds across Southeast Asia. Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson said it was a “huge win” as the “largest darknet marketplace to have ever existed has been shut down.” “It’s a game-changer in terms of overall online criminal markets, and it's huge for victims of online fraud.
It was to be severed from the US banking system. Xinbi Guarantee growingHowever, another Telegram-based illicit marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee has been identified by Elliptic, which discovered thousands of crypto addresses used by the merchants on it. On May 13, the firm said that it has seen $8.4 billion in transactions so far, but that should be considered as “lower bounds of the true volume of transactions on the platform.”Xinbi was linked to a Colorado-based company that was incorporated in 2022 but listed as delinquent in January 2025.
Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told the outlet, “communities previously reported to us by WIRED or included in reports published by Elliptic have all been taken down,” before adding that “criminal activities like scamming or money laundering are forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service and are always removed whenever discovered.” Closure notice on Haowang Guarantee website.
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Author / Journalist: Cointelegraph by Martin Young
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