Telegram Channels Seized as Xinbi Faces U.S. Enforcement

The U.S. Justice Department restrained more than $52 million in crypto tied to Xinbi Guarantee and its vendor network on Wednesday, while the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control simultaneously designated Xinbi as a significant transnational criminal organization. The coordinated action also reached the marketplace’s Telegram infrastructure and the technology providers accused of keeping it running, according to the primary source.

Xinbi Sanctions and Crypto Restraints

The DOJ’s Scam Center Strike Force seized two wallets Xinbi allegedly used to collect vendor payments, containing roughly $12 million, and sought restraints against 47 additional wallets believed connected to money laundering across the network. The Justice Department said the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia authorized seizure of the Telegram channels hosting the marketplace on Sept. 7.

According to the unsealed warrant, vendors allegedly used those channels to advertise money laundering services, custom scam-investment websites and recruitment for scam compounds in Southeast Asia. That combination of asset restraints and communications-channel seizure marks a shift toward treating the marketplace itself, not just individual scammers, as the target – a distinction that matters for how U.S. crypto oversight and enforcement authority is applied going forward.

Treasury’s OFAC action ran in parallel. The agency designated Singapore-based SafeW Technology and Cambodia-based Anwen Technology for allegedly providing technological and financial support to Xinbi. Treasury said Xinbi began moving merchant and laundering networks to SafeW’s encrypted messaging app around June 2025 as law-enforcement scrutiny intensified, while Anwen allegedly developed XinbiPay – also known as NewPay – a crypto wallet and payment application used by the marketplace.

Treasury put Xinbi’s total volume at more than $24 billion in crypto and fiat processed since around 2022, primarily through Southeast Asia. The sanctions block Xinbi’s U.S. property and interests and generally prohibit U.S. persons from transacting with any of the designated entities.

Where Xinbi Sits in the Scam-Marketplace Ecosystem

Treasury said Xinbi’s platform has reportedly been used by North Korean hackers and by entities connected to the sanctioned Prince Group, though those links remain allegations tied to the department’s designation rather than adjudicated findings. Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, told Cointelegraph that Xinbi became the go-to escrow and cash-out layer for Southeast Asia’s scam compounds after Huione Guarantee went down, describing the scale as industrial.

The DOJ framed the operation as expanding enforcement beyond individual operators to the marketplaces and service providers that let scam networks function at all. That framing lines up with the broader compliance direction the industry has been moving toward, where formal licensing regimes like Hungary’s MiCA approval sit at the opposite end of the spectrum from unregistered, Telegram-native marketplaces operating outside any regulatory perimeter.

Wednesday’s action is not the first against Xinbi. The United Kingdom sanctioned the platform on March 26, freezing UK-connected assets and barring Xinbi from the country’s financial, trade and travel networks. Various third-party volume estimates for Xinbi’s activity – ranging well above and below Treasury’s $24 billion figure – circulate across different blockchain-analytics firms, but those numbers reflect different methodologies and time windows rather than a single agreed total, and none should be treated as confirmed absent independent verification.

What the Sanctions Mean for Crypto Compliance

OFAC’s designation carries the standard consequence of any transnational-criminal-organization listing: U.S. persons are now generally barred from transacting with Xinbi, SafeW or Anwen, and any U.S. property tied to the three is blocked. That reaches beyond individual scam operators into the payment rails, messaging infrastructure and wallet software that made Xinbi’s scale possible in the first place.

Notably, the DOJ credited stablecoin issuer Tether with assisting the investigation, a detail that underscores how issuer-side cooperation has become a working part of enforcement against illicit dollar-pegged flows. Combined with the Telegram channel seizure, the action targets both financial and communications infrastructure at once – a pairing regulators have used sparingly until now but which fits a pattern of trying to disrupt scam networks at the platform level rather than one wallet at a time.

Whether this pushes exchanges, stablecoin issuers and payment processors toward materially different screening standards is an open question that the primary enforcement record does not answer; any claims to that effect belong in the category of analyst speculation rather than confirmed policy shift, and should be treated as such until regulators or the firms themselves say otherwise.

What Comes Next

The DOJ’s pursuit of restraints against the 47 additional wallets tied to Xinbi’s alleged laundering network remains active, and how much of that $52 million-plus figure ultimately converts into permanent forfeiture will depend on court proceedings still ahead. The Justice Department’s filing sits alongside the UK’s earlier March sanctions as the second government-level action against Xinbi specifically, though the primary record does not point to a scheduled next step or a confirmed additional country joining the effort.

Any expectation that other jurisdictions will move against similar Telegram-based marketplaces, or that scam networks will migrate en masse to alternative stablecoins less exposed to issuer-level freezing, remains speculative at this stage and unconfirmed by official enforcement documents. Investors tracking exposure to sanctioned counterparties should treat those scenarios as possibilities worth watching rather than established trajectories.

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