How Did Telegram Shut Down Haowang Guarantee?  

Telegram banned all Haowang Guarantee accounts, channels, and NFTs. The platform served scammers in Southeast Asia, processing $27 billion in Tether’s USDT. Elliptic’s July 2024 report triggered the operation. Haowang was notorious for money laundering and “pig butchering” scams. Despite signs of fraud and USDT laundering, its groups and channels operated on Telegram for years. Following a Wired investigation exposing the scale of P2P crypto fraud, Haowang lost its Telegram presence.  

The platform stated, “As all our NFTs, channels, and groups were blocked by Telegram on May 13, 2025, Haowang Guarantee will cease operations.”  

Xinbi Guarantee: A New Threat  

Elliptic revealed that Telegram-based Xinbi Guarantee processed $8.4 billion in USDT transactions. Active since 2022, Xinbi saw $1 billion in inflows in 2024. Telegram also deleted Xinbi-linked accounts. However, criminal networks are shifting to new markets like Tudou Guarantee. Experts warn that these shutdowns may not fully resolve the issue. Elliptic’s co-founder Tom Robinson said, “This is a cat-and-mouse game. These are big mice,” noting that crime syndicates may move to new platforms or less-regulated messaging services.  

What Is Telegram Doing Against Crypto Crime?  

Telegram is proactively combating crypto crime, halting Haowang and Xinbi’s combined $35 billion transaction volume. Countries like Australia and Germany are also cracking down on similar platforms. Platform swiftly closes accounts violating its terms of service. However, experts caution that criminals may find new avenues.  

Similarly, Australia blocked over 90 scam platforms, and Germany shut down eXch, linked to the Bybit attack. The fight against crypto crime is intensifying.  

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Huione Guarantee, an online marketplace operated by the Cambodian conglomerate Huione Group, has been implicated in facilitating online scams in Southeast Asia. According to the latest Elliptic Research report, the platform engaged in transactions surpassing $11 billion, a significant portion of which is linked to money laundering and cyber scams.

Dr. Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist at Elliptic, explained to Cointelegraph that the team could “quantify” the cryptocurrency transactions due to “the transparency of the blockchain.” This transparency allows these crypto transactions to be tracked and blocked, a capability not possible with traditional payment methods.

Huione Guarantee’s marketplace operates primarily in Chinese and involves thousands of instant messaging app channels, each managed by separate merchants. These merchants offer various services fundamental to the operation of cyber scams, including selling personal data, money laundering, and software and web development for scam websites. The platform also offers tools and equipment utilized for the imprisonment and torture of workers in scam compounds.

While the platform uses payment methods such as bank transfers and payment apps, it predominantly uses Tether (USDT), which is easier to track than traditional fiat flows.

Elliptic’s investigation into Huione Guarantee led to the labeling of hundreds of crypto addresses associated with the platform and its merchants. Dr. Robinson told Cointelegraph that businesses could use blockchain analytics “to ensure that they or their customers are not transacting with services such as Huione Guarantee.”

“We have labeled several hundred addresses in our tools that are used by these entities, and our customers can screen transactions and wallets for links to them.”

This identification enables exchanges and other businesses to screen transactions and prevent the continued laundering of illicit funds. “Law enforcement can trace these payments and pursue those responsible for these scams. Crypto is a weak point of those scams that make use of it, which can be used to help bring those responsible to justice,” added Dr. Robinson.

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Blockchain analysis firm Elliptic said it has made progress in using artificial intelligence to detect Bitcoin money laundering. The firm said in a statement that it used these advances to improve Elliptic’s detection tools and detailed this work “in a new research paper co-authored with researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.”

In the company’s statement, it was stated that “A deep learning model was used to successfully detect criminal proceeds deposited on a crypto exchange, new money laundering transaction patterns, and previously unknown illegal wallets.” Elliptic stated that it tested the developed tools on a data set containing more than 200 million transactions.

“Instead of identifying transactions carried out by illicit actors, a machine learning model is trained to successfully identify ‘subgraphs,’ chains of transactions where dirty money is represented,” Elliptic said. “This approach allows us to focus on the ‘multi-hop’ money laundering process in general, rather than focusing on the behavior of specific illicit actors in the chain.”

Compared to traditional financial transactions, which “are often discrete,” blockchains make it easier to use machine learning to better examine transactions, according to Elliptic. Elliptic has a track record of identifying crypto transactions made by shady actors such as terrorist groups.

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