**Chinese Crypto Scammers on Telegram Fuel the Biggest Darknet Markets Ever**

The dark web, a realm once thought impenetrable by law enforcement and regulators, has long been synonymous with black markets for illicit goods and services. However, in recent years, this perceived veil of anonymity has given way to an even more insidious threat: Chinese crypto scammers on Telegram.

When the first darknet marketplaces emerged over a decade ago, it was believed that cryptocurrency and the technical sophistication of Tor would make them virtually untouchable. However, in 2025, all it takes is a messaging platform willing to host scammers and human traffickers, persistence, and fluency in Chinese to facilitate tens of billions of dollars' worth of illicit transactions online.

A new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic reveals that the ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers on Telegram has grown to unprecedented levels. Despite a brief drop after Telegram banned two of the largest such markets in early 2025, the current top markets, 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 including pregnancy surrogacy and teen prostitution.

The crypto romance and investment scams, known as "pig butchering," have 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 these 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 also the biggest in history, dwarfing every online marketplace before them.

AlphaBay, once the largest dark-web market for drugs, stolen data, and hacking tools, facilitated more than $1 billion in transactions over its two and a half years online. Hydra, a Russian dark-web market that 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 staggering $27 billion in transactions from 2021 to 2025.

Elliptic has dubbed 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 but didn't receive a response. In May, Telegram seemed to finally take action, banning Huione Guarantee after it was named as a money-laundering operation by the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

However, since then, Tudou Guarantee 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.

When WIRED wrote to Telegram in June to point out how these markets had rebuilt their criminal empires in plain sight, the company responded that it had decided not to ban the markets again. It argued 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 statement continued. "We remain unwavering in our commitment to safeguarding user privacy and defending fundamental freedoms, including the right to financial autonomy."

However, 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, including posts on Xinbo suggesting sex trafficking of minors in advertisements for "lolita" or "young girl" sex workers.

The scam operation customers they service 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," says Erin West, a former Santa Clara County, California, prosecutor who now leads the Operation Shamrock anti-scam organization. "Instead, they're hosting Craigslist for crypto scammers."

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 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. The response to this ballooning scam industry "hasn't risen to that level of coordination and urgency yet," says Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard's Asia Center who focuses on transnational crime.

"And it needs to before we see this thing prioritized at the level that is actually commensurate with the damage it's causing," Sims concludes.