Telegram Is Still Hosting a Sanctioned $21 Billion Crypto Scammer Black Market

Xinbi Guarantee has also hosted a wide variety of other black market offerings, including harassment services that threaten or throw feces at a victim for pay, and even sex workers as young as 14 who are likely trafficking victims. A listing Elliptic shared with WIRED, found in recent weeks, featured a 16-year-old sex worker, including the girl’s measurements and available sex acts.

As clearly as all of these examples contradict Telegram’s arguments for hosting Xinbi Guarantee, the UK government’s official sanctions against Xinbi are even clearer, says Elliptic’s Robinson. “It was already a weak argument, but the Xinbi sanction makes the argument much weaker,” Robinson says. “There is now official recognition that Xinbi is primarily an illicit actor. »

Telegram’s tolerance of Xinbi Guarantee is all the stranger given that it actually banned the market at one point last year. After WIRED asked Telegram about Elliptic’s findings regarding the Xinbi Guarantee and a then-even larger market known as the Huione Guarantee, Telegram summarily purged the accounts of both. Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn wrote to WIRED at the time that “criminal activities like scams or money laundering are prohibited by Telegram’s terms of service and are always removed as soon as they are discovered.”

However, over the next month, Elliptic continued to share its findings about apparent money laundering activities within a Telegram group that included a WIRED reporter and a Telegram spokesperson. Yet after its initial bans, Telegram did not remove any accounts for the black markets highlighted by Elliptic, and Xinbi Garantie simply rebuilt its market despite Telegram’s own statement that it had violated the messaging platform’s terms of service.

Perhaps aware of its vulnerability to another Telegram ban, Xinbi Guarantie asked its users to switch to another platform called SafeW. But the vast majority of Xinbi Guarantie’s activity has remained on Telegram, and Elliptic’s Robinson says the market will struggle to move users to SafeW. “Xinbi benefits from Telegram’s huge installed user base, which would be very difficult for SafeW to replicate,” says Robinson.

For now, of course, Xinbi Guarantee doesn’t need to go anywhere, given that Telegram is hosting its blatantly criminal activities for all to see. DarkTower’s Warner says this represents an inexcusable lack of attention to Telegram’s activation of Chinese-language black markets, both from Telegram itself and law enforcement agencies around the world.

When Russian cybercriminals organized black markets selling malware and stolen data, Warner points out, international law enforcement coalitions targeted these criminals and their infrastructure, leading to repeated seizures and arrests. Given how Telegram has openly hosted an even larger criminal ecosystem, the company and its founder and CEO Pavel Durov deserve the same treatment, Warner argues. (Durov was actually arrested and charged in France in 2024, but has since been released while the French government’s investigation continues.)

“It should be the subject of an international working group,” says Warner. “He should be hunted down and arrested. He should be held to account.”