The Internet's Biggest-Ever Black Market Just Shut Down Amid a Telegram Purge

WIRED

14-05-2025

May 14, 2025 4:00 PM Following a WIRED inquiry, Telegram banned thousands of accounts used for crypto scam money laundering, including those of Haowang Guarantee, a black market that enabled over $27 billion in transactions. Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff;For years, a Chinese-language market for crypto scammers and money launderers—by some measures, the internet's biggest black market of all time—operated in plain sight on the messaging service Telegram, facilitating tens of billions of dollars in illicit finance. Now, thanks to the scrutiny of one team of crypto crime researchers and Telegram's ban hammer, it's gone.
Haowang Guarantee, the crypto-fueled crime bazaar more widely known by its original name, Huione Guarantee, declared in an announcement posted to its website sometime in the last 24 hours that it would be shutting down. The move comes in response to Telegram's action on Monday to ban thousands of accounts and usernames that served as the infrastructure for the sprawling marketplace of third-party vendors, many of whom provided money laundering and other services to the burgeoning industry of East Asian crypto scammers.
'Telegrame were blocked all of our NFT, Channels and group on May 13th 2025, Haowang Grarantee will cease operation from now,' the company wrote on its website in a short, typo-ridden statement in English, apparently using the acronym NFT to refer to the blockchain-based non-fungible tokens that serve as proof of ownership for certain Telegram usernames. 'Thank you for your attention.'
Prior to its abrupt shutdown, Haowang Guarantee—which despite its rebrand was still partially owned by Huione Guarantee and its Cambodia-based parent company Huione Group—had allowed third party vendors to sell a wide variety of services to crypto scammers, all via Telegram, using deposit and escrow systems to 'guarantee' the transactions. Huione Guarantee merchants primarily offered money laundering via the cryptocurrency Tether, but they also sold other components of the crypto scam industry ranging from potential victim data for targeting, telecommunications infrastructure, deepfake software, and even GPS-enabled collars and electric batons used to enslave workers in the scam compounds that have spread across Myanmar, Cambodia, and the Philippines.
Telegram's sudden move to ban the marketplace's accounts appears to have been spurred by WIRED's inquiry to Telegram late last week about new findings from researchers at the the crypto-tracing firm Elliptic. Since July of last year, Elliptic has highlighted the enormous volume of money laundering and other illicit transactions taking place on Huione Guarantee and later Haowang Guarantee. By Elliptic's accounting in a January report, the market and its rebrand had facilitated more than $24 billion in total transactions, which would make it by far the largest single black market operation in the internet's history. That figure has since jumped to $27 billion, according to Elliptic.
Elliptic's latest findings concerned a second Telegram-based market known as Xinbi Guarantee, which offered a similar model of third-party transactions and had facilitated $8.4 billion in deals since 2022 that researchers say included not only money laundering for scammers, but also stolen data, harassment for hire, and apparent sex trafficking. When WIRED asked Telegram about Elliptic's findings regarding both markets, the company responded with broad bans of Xinbi Guarantee and Haowang Guarantee accounts.
'This is a huge win. The largest darknet marketplace to have ever existed has been shut down," says Elliptic's co-founder Tom Robinson. "It's a game-changer in terms of overall online criminal markets, and it's huge for victims of online fraud. This marketplace was a key enabler of the global scam epidemic, and I think this will put a real dent in the ability of online scammers to do what they do.'
In a statement sent to WIRED Monday, Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn wrote that 'communities previously reported to us by WIRED or included in reports published by Elliptic have all been taken down," and added that 'criminal activities like scamming or money laundering are forbidden by Telegram's terms of service and are always removed whenever discovered.' Telegram declined to comment further following Haowang's announcement that it was going offline.
Although it wasn't mentioned in Vaughn's statement, Telegram's ban may have also been related to an announcement earlier this month from the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network that Huione Group, Huione Guarantee and Haowang Guarantee's parent company, would be added to a list of known money laundering operations in an attempt to limit its access to US financial institutions.
While Haowang Guarantee responded to Telegram's bans by almost immediately shutting down, Xinbi Guarantee appears to be making an effort to relaunch itself on new Telegram channels, Robinson says. Elliptic says that Haowang Guarantee's owners also own a stake in another similar Telegram-based market called Tudou Guarantee, according to a Telegram post from one of Haowang's administrators, and may seek to rebuild their business there. Tudou Guarantee has already seen a significant surge in new users, Robinson says.
Whether the two markets succeed in relaunching, Robinson notes, will depend largely on how serious Telegram is about its efforts to prevent them from using its messaging services.
'Are they going to pursue all of these marketplaces and continue to do so as new ones emerge?" Robinson asks. "If so, I think that Telegram is no longer a realistic platform for these marketplaces and they'll have to look for somewhere else to operate.' He suggests the crypto scam market operators would then likely try to migrate to another messaging service with less oversight, or even a decentralized one where they can't be effectively banned.
Haowang, in particular, has powerful backing from a company with links to businesses associated with the Cambodian ruling family. Huione Guarantee's parent company, the Cambodian financial conglomerate Huione Group, includes a company linked to the family of Cambodia's prime minister, Hun Manet. Hun To, the prime minister's cousin, serves as one of those companies' directors—and has also been linked in an Al Jazeera investigation to an alleged scam compound.
All of that means Telegram's takedowns are by no means the end of the crypto scam industry, says Robinson. They may, however, represent a serious setback for the markets that cash out its profits and launder its money.
'Online crime is a cat-and-mouse game in general. But these are very large mice,' Robinson says. 'It's a big blow to the criminal ecosystem that will take a long time to recover from."