The US Treasury sanctioned Xinbi Guarantee on Wednesday, a Chinese-language marketplace on Telegram that authorities say sold scam websites, money laundering services and stolen data to criminal networks moving as much as $24 billion in transactions since 2022. The action, taken by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, designates Xinbi as a significant transnational criminal organization. Two companies described as supporting its core operations, Singapore-based SafeW Technology and Cambodia-based Anwen Technology, were sanctioned alongside it.
A marketplace built on Telegram
According to the Justice Department, Xinbi ran an escrow service for vendors advertising custom scam investment sites, laundering services and the recruitment of trafficking victims for Southeast Asian scam compounds. A buyer’s payment was held until the vendor delivered the work, which gave scammers confidence that services would arrive. The marketplace counted more than 650,000 users, many of them operators running romance scams, fake investment platforms and pig-butchering operations aimed at victims in the United States and Europe.
A federal judge in Washington authorized the seizure of the Telegram channels hosting the marketplace on September 7. The next day, the US Secret Service froze $52.8 million in USDT held across 52 wallets, working with blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, which said its intelligence directly enabled both the freeze and the sanctions. Two wallets Xinbi allegedly used for vendor payments held about $12 million, and 47 more wallets tied to laundering were restrained. The Justice Department credited stablecoin issuer Tether for assistance in the investigation.
“If Chinese organized crime can buy a custom website and a money laundering service the way you order takeout, then every American with a retirement account is in the blast radius,” said US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who leads the department’s Scam Center Strike Force.
Xinbi moves funds to a freeze-resistant coin
Xinbi did not accept the freeze quietly. The marketplace posted a statement calling the action “arbitrary freezing” and promised to compensate customers. On-chain data shows it has already swapped about $2.8 million of its remaining USDT into USDD, a stablecoin launched by Tron founder Justin Sun that has no central issuer with a freeze switch, though its reserves are partly backed by USDT. Some funds escaped before the freeze completed: tracking accounts reported roughly $1.8 million in USDT moved out, with only a small portion caught in time.
The DOJ’s Scam Center Strike Force says it has now seized or restrained about $938 million since launching in November 2025. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said scam centers in Southeast Asia steal billions of dollars from American victims each year and that the department would keep using its tools to disrupt the networks behind the fraud. Attorney General officials said the one-day restraint of more than $52 million was among the largest coordinated crypto seizures the strike force has carried out.
Part of a wider crackdown
The Xinbi action follows earlier Treasury measures against Prince Group and Huione Group, two networks accused of running or serving industrial-scale scam operations. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office sanctioned Xinbi in March. Investigators also linked the platform to financial activity tied to North Korean hackers, including laundering channels used after major exchange thefts.
The platform’s flight to newer tools started before the freeze. Treasury said Xinbi began moving its merchant and money laundering networks to SafeW, an encrypted messaging application, last year after law enforcement scrutiny increased. Around the same time it launched XinbiPay, a cryptocurrency wallet application developed by Anwen. Wednesday’s sanctions extend to both companies, cutting them from the US financial system and exposing any US person who deals with them to penalties. Property and interests owned by the designated entities in the United States or under US control are blocked and must be reported to OFAC.
For the crypto industry, the case shows both sides of stablecoin traceability. USDT’s built-in freeze function let Tether help lock down $52.8 million within a day, something impossible with most cryptocurrencies, but the flight into USDD underlines the limits of any single issuer’s control. Analysts expect the remaining wallets to fragment across smaller coins and mixers, which raises costs for investigators but leaves traces all the same. Enforcement now moves to the wallets and exchanges that touch the remaining funds, and to Southeast Asian governments whose jurisdictions host the scam compounds the marketplace served.
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