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

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 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 dark-net marketplace to have ever existed has been shut down,” says Elliptic cofounder 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.”