Chinese Crypto Scammers on Telegram Are Fueling the Biggest Darknet Markets Ever

When black markets for drugs, guns, and all manner of contraband first sprang up on the dark web more than a decade ago, it seemed that cryptocurrency and the technical sophistication of the anonymity software Tor were the keys to carrying out billions of dollars worth of untouchable, illicit transactions online.

Now, all of that looks a bit passé. In 2025, all it takes to get away with tens of billions of dollars in black-market crypto deals is a messaging platform willing to host scammers and human traffickers, enough persistence to relaunch channels and accounts on that service when they’re occasionally banned, and fluency in Chinese.

The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market services as varied as pregnancy surrogacy and teen prostitution.

The crypto romance and investment scams regrettably known as “pig butchering”—carried out largely from compounds in Southeast Asia staffed with thousands of human trafficking victims—have grown to become the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They pull in around $10 billion annually from US victims alone, according to the FBI. By selling money-laundering services and other scam-related offerings to those operations, markets like Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel to an immense scale.

“When you consider illicit use of crypto assets, there really isn’t anything larger right now,” says Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s cofounder and chief scientist.

In fact, these criminal trading zones aren’t simply the biggest online black markets of the moment, but the biggest in history. AlphaBay was once the biggest dark-web market for drugs, stolen data, and hacking tools. Described by the FBI as 10 times the size of the original Silk Road dark-web drug market at its peak, AlphaBay facilitated more than $1 billion in transactions over its two and a half years online. Hydra, a Russian dark-web market that also offered money-laundering services to cryptocurrency thieves and ransomware groups, did more than $5 billion in transactions over its seven years of operation.

By comparison, Huione Guarantee, the Chinese-language, Telegram-based market used largely by crypto scammers, facilitated a stunning $27 billion in transactions from 2021 to 2025, according to Elliptic, dwarfing every online black market before it, even as it operated in full public view on Telegram’s messaging platform. Elliptic has called it simply “the largest illicit online marketplace to have ever operated.”

WIRED reached out on Telegram to administrators of both Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee for comment but didn’t receive a response.

In May, Telegram seemed to finally take action, banning Huione Guarantee—which had rebranded as Haowang Guarantee—after it was named as a money-laundering operation by the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. But since then, Tudou Guarantee, in which Haowang Guarantee owns a stake, has grown to fill that same position. Elliptic now measures its transactions at $1.1 billion a month, close to Haowang’s $1.4 billion a month. The second-biggest crypto scam market, Xinbi Guarantee, has meanwhile grown to $850 million a month—despite also being banned in May and relaunching—adding up to more total market volume than ever. And those two black markets are just two of around 30 that Elliptic tracks, together carrying out tens of billions of dollars in annual transactions.

When WIRED wrote to Telegram in June to point out how these markets had rebuilt their criminal empires in plain sight—in fact, a WIRED reporter had even been present in a Telegram channel where Elliptic shared its findings about Tudou Guarantee’s and Xinbi Guarantee’s rebound with Telegram corporate contacts—the company responded that it had decided not to ban the markets again, arguing that they offered an outlet for Chinese users looking for financial freedom from “capital controls” that “often leave citizens with little choice but to seek alternative avenues for moving funds internationally.” “We assess reports on a case-by-case basis and categorically reject blanket bans—particularly when users are attempting to circumvent oppressive restrictions imposed by authoritarian regimes,” Telegram’s June statement to WIRED continued. “We remain unwavering in our commitment to safeguarding user privacy and defending fundamental freedoms, including the right to financial autonomy.”

But Elliptic and other scam-industry analysts have rejected that argument, pointing out that the vast majority of activity in markets like Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee is criminal. Aside from scam-related services, they also sell prostitution—posts on Xinbo include suggestions of sex trafficking of minors in posts advertising “lolita” or “young girl” sex workers. The scam operation customers they service, too, are widely documented to use forced laborers in often brutal, modern slavery compounds.

“They have the ability to shut down a scam economy and the trafficking of human beings. Instead, they’re hosting Craigslist for crypto scammers,” says Erin West, a former Santa Clara County, California, prosecutor who now leads the Operation Shamrock anti-scam organization. “These are bad guys enabling bad-guy business on their bad-guy platform.”

Aside from Telegram, the cryptocurrency Tether also plays a key role in scam markets—the popular “stablecoin” is the preferred tool for all of the markets’ money-laundering transactions. Unlike most crypto, Tether has a centralized structure that would allow the company—also called Tether—that backs that digital currency to seize or freeze funds at will, yet it has rarely interfered with the vast money flows it enables.

Neither Telegram nor Tether responded to WIRED’s requests for comment on their roles in enabling Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee’s black market transactions.

Tether and Telegram’s efforts to combat the ballooning scam industry’s use of their tools is comparable to Southeast Asian law enforcement’s minimal, often performative shows of raiding scam compounds, only to allow them to rebuild and resume operation, argues Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Asia Center who focuses on transnational crime. “There is impunity on all levels that prevents any meaningful disruption,” says Sims.

Sims argues that only focused and cooperative international government and law enforcement pressure, comparable to the global effort to combat terrorism or drug trafficking, will change that lax approach, including from companies that are facilitating the scam epidemic.

The response to this ballooning scam industry “hasn’t risen to that level of coordination and urgency yet,” Sims says. “And it needs to before we see this thing prioritized at the level that is actually commensurate with the damage it’s causing.”