A major Chinese darknet marketplace suspected of facilitating crypto scams and cybercrime has been shut down by the Telegram messaging service, upon which it operated.

The internet’s largest illicit marketplace, Haowang Guarantee, formerly Huione Guarantee, said it will shut down following Telegram’s ban of thousands of associated accounts on May 13. 

“Since all our NFTs, channels and groups were blocked by Telegram on May 13, 2025, Haowang Guarantee will cease operations from now on,” read the notice on the marketplace website.

A report from Wired said that this involved banning thousands of accounts and usernames that served as the infrastructure for the crypto crime marketplace and its vendors.

Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told the outlet, “communities previously reported to us by WIRED or included in reports published by Elliptic have all been taken down,” before adding that “criminal activities like scamming or money laundering are forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service and are always removed whenever discovered.” 

Closure notice on Haowang Guarantee website. Source: Haowang Guarantee

The Chinese language black marketplace facilitated an estimated $27 billion in illicit transactions, predominantly using the Tether stablecoin (USDT), according to blockchain security firm Elliptic. 

Elliptic researchers also found that the wider Huione Group of companies had facilitated over $98 billion in crypto transactions.

Related: Largest ‘illicit online marketplace’ has grown 51% in 6 months: Elliptic

The marketplace provided services to crypto scammers, including money laundering, stolen personal data used for pig butchering scams, telecommunications infrastructure and equipment, deepfake software and IDs, and even physical restraint devices used in scam call center compounds across Southeast Asia. 

Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson said it was a “huge win” as the “largest darknet marketplace to have ever existed has been shut down.” 

“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.”

In early May, the platform was designated as a money laundering operation by the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). It was to be severed from the US banking system. 

Xinbi Guarantee growing

However, another Telegram-based illicit marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee has been identified by Elliptic, which discovered thousands of crypto addresses used by the merchants on it. 

On May 13, the firm said that it has seen $8.4 billion in transactions so far, but that should be considered as “lower bounds of the true volume of transactions on the platform.”

Xinbi was linked to a Colorado-based company that was incorporated in 2022 but listed as delinquent in January 2025.

Black marketplaces such as these have unveiled a “China-based underground banking system,” based around stablecoins and crypto payments, which is being leveraged for money laundering on a “significant scale,” Elliptic stated.

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The US Senate could pass a key bipartisan stablecoin bill as soon as next week after removing language targeting President Donald Trump and his family’s sprawling crypto interests.

Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis said onstage at an event by Coinbase’s lobbying arm, Stand With Crypto, that she thinks it’s a “fair target” to have the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, or GENIUS Act, passed by May 26 — Memorial Day in the US.

Joining her onstage was Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who hinted that the bill’s language was changed to scrap provisions that targeted Trump’s various crypto projects, which include memecoins, a crypto platform, a stablecoin, and a crypto mining company that plans to go public, among others.

“When this language comes out, people will see really good refinement, a lot of progress, on things like consumer protection, and bankruptcy protection, and ethics,” Gillibrand said. “Things beyond just ‘what’s the structure?’ and ‘what’s required for an issuer?’”

Source: Brian Armstrong

Senate Democrats pulled support for the bill on May 8 and stalled its momentum, airing concerns that it wouldn’t help address multiple crypto-tied deals that will personally enrich Trump.

“A lot of what President Trump is engaged in is already illegal,” Gillibrand said. “I also think his issuance of a memecoin is illegal based on current law.”

“It’s literally offering anyone who wants to curry favor with the administration to just send him money — that’s about as illegal as it gets.”

“I’m not so worried about this bill having to deal with all President Trump’s ethics problems. What this bill is really intended to do is regulate the entire space of stablecoins,” she added.

Gillibrand said the revised bill includes “some ethics requirements,” but it was “not an ethics bill.”

“If we were dealing with all President Trump’s ethics problems, it would be a very long and detailed bill,” she added.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, also on stage, was hopeful the Senate would vote on the stablecoin bill “early next week.”

Armstrong, whose company cozied up to Trump by donating $1 million to his inauguration fund, declined to comment when asked if the President’s memecoin could impact the passage of bipartisan crypto bills.

“It’s not my place to really comment on President Trump’s activity,” he said. “What I do think is important is that this bill remains focused on stablecoins.”

Crypto bills “absolutely critical” to pass before midterms

The crypto industry is pushing for Congress to pass the GENIUS Act and a Republican-drafted crypto market structure bill before the midterm elections on Nov. 3, 2026, where all 435 House seats and a third of the 100 Senate seats are up for election.

“We have a very narrow window to get legislation through between now and the midterms,” Marta Belcher, the president of the crypto lobby group the Blockchain Association, told Cointelegraph at the Consensus conference in Toronto.

“I strongly suspect that window is going to close very quickly. I don’t know if we’re going to get another window like this to get legislation through,” she added.

“It’s absolutely critical that we get it through now, especially because there really is a real possibility that in the future we end up with an administration that is hostile to crypto.”

The Association’s communications director, Chris Jonas, added that it’s critical the bills pass before Congress takes a recess for the month of August.

Related: Crypto execs flock to DC to support Senate stablecoin bill 

“Once you get into the calendar year of the midterms, historically not a lot of legislation moves, so that’s why it’s so critical,” he explained.

Trump should be on track to sign both crypto bills before the August break, according to Bo Hines, the executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.

Hines noted on stage at Consensus on May 13 that negotiations on both bills are still ongoing, but it was “the President’s desire” to sign both “stablecoin legislation and market structure legislation before the August recess.”

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A Singapore High Court has ruled in favor of Sonic Labs’ motion to force the Multichain Foundation to wind up in an effort to recover funds stolen during a 2023 hack.

In the May 9 judgment in the Singapore Supreme Court, Justice Kwek Mean Luck granted a request from Sonic Labs, formerly the Fantom Foundation, to declare Multichain bankrupt and appoint liquidators from global audit, tax and advisory service KPMG.

Sonic Labs CEO Michael Kong said in a May 14 statement to X that the team behind the layer 1 Sonic blockchain felt it had no choice but to file a lawsuit to forcibly wind up Multichain because its former employees were being “completely uncooperative” and “hid from victims.”

“Going forward, the liquidators can now start working with other parties to initiate the process of trying to acquire funds that should eventually be returned to users if those legal proceedings are successful,” Kong said.

Source: Michael Kong

In July 2023, the Multichain Foundation experienced abnormally large outflows, later confirmed as a hack, leading to the loss of assets across multiple chains, including Fantom, Ethereum, BNB, Cronos and Polygon.

Blockchain security firm Beosin and Fantom estimated in an August 2023 report that the total losses for all chains were at least $210 million.

Wind up action followed legal win 

The High Court of Singapore granted a default judgment ruling in January 2024 as part of Sonic Labs’ legal action against Multichain for breach of contract, fraudulent misrepresentations and claims the crosschain protocol had lost $122 million of its funds.

Related: Multichain’s ‘mysterious withdrawals’ have whiffs of a ‘rug pull’ — Chainalysis

Following the ruling, Sonic Labs said in March 2024 it would leverage the legal win to petition the court to wind up the Multichain Foundation and appoint a liquidator, equivalent to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the US, to help recover and distribute missing or frozen assets.

Previously, Sonic Labs indicated it planned to use the legal win to forge a path for other victims of the Multichain hack to lodge claims for their losses as well.

Multichain shut down in July 2024 due to a lack of operational funds, and after its CEO, known as Zhaojun, was detained by Chinese police.

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