The shop where scammers bought everything they needed has gone dark
Behind almost every romance or fake investment scam that empties someone's savings there is a supply chain, and a great deal of it ran through one Telegram-based marketplace until Wednesday.
On 9 September the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Xinbi Guarantee a significant transnational criminal organisation. In the same action the Justice Department's Scam Center Strike Force and the Secret Service, working with the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, seized two cryptocurrency wallets and froze $52.8 million spread across 52 wallets tied to Xinbi and its merchants. Treasury reckons the marketplace has moved more than $24 billion in crypto and currency since roughly 2022. Two companies that kept it running were sanctioned too: Anwen Technology in Cambodia, which builds the XinbiPay wallet, and SafeW Technology in Singapore, which makes the messaging app the vendors used. Telegram deleted the channels, and Elliptic reports the marketplace now appears to be offline.
What it sold is the interesting part. Xinbi sat in the middle as an escrow service between vendors and scam operators, and the stock included custom-built fraudulent websites, money laundering, forged bank cards, services for getting past identity checks, bulk stolen personal data, and recruitment for the compounds in Southeast Asia where trafficked workers are put on the scripts. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's summary was blunt: scam centres in Southeast Asia steal billions of dollars from American victims every year. The Strike Force says it has now restrained $938 million in total and helped dismantle 13 compounds in Madagascar, interviewing nearly 400 people held there.
Be realistic about what this changes. HuiOne and Tudou Guarantee both closed in 2025, and Xinbi grew into the space they left. So the defence at your end is unchanged: an unsolicited tip from someone charming, a trading platform you only heard about through a link, an app you were talked into installing. That last one is where a PC gets involved, and Tendvane's Safety check for unwanted software goes through what is installed and flags the things that arrived without a good reason.