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 a fee, and even sex workers as young as 14 who are likely trafficking victims. One listing Elliptic shared with WIRED, found just in recent weeks, offered a 16-year-old sex worker, including the girl’s body size measurements and available sex acts.

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

Telegram’s tolerance for Xinbi Guarantee is all the stranger because it did, in fact, ban the market at one point last year. After WIRED asked Telegram about Elliptic’s findings regarding Xinbi Guarantee and a then-even-larger market known as Huione Guarantee, Telegram summarily purged the accounts of both. Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn wrote to WIRED at the time that “criminal activities like scamming or money laundering are forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service and are always removed whenever discovered.”

Over the following month, however, Elliptic continued to share its findings about apparent money laundering activity in a Telegram group that included a WIRED reporter and a Telegram spokesperson. Yet after its initial bans, Telegram didn’t remove any accounts for the black markets Elliptic highlighted, and Xinbi Guarantee simply rebuilt its marketplace 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 Guarantee has asked its users to transition to another platform called SafeW. But the vast majority of Xinbi Guarantee’s activity has remained on Telegram, and Elliptic’s Robinson argues that the market will have a tough time moving users to SafeW. “Xinbi benefits from Telegram’s huge installed user base, something that would be very challenging for SafeW to replicate,” Robinson says.

For now, of course, Xinbi Guarantee doesn’t have to go anywhere, given Telegram hosting its blatantly criminal activity in plain sight. DarkTower’s Warner argues that represents an inexcusable lack of attention to Telegram’s enabling of Chinese-language black markets, both on the part of Telegram itself and law enforcement agencies worldwide.

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

“He should be the subject of an international task force,” claims Warner. “He should be hunted down and arrested. He should be forced to be held accountable.”