US Treasury Sanctions Xinbi Scam Marketplace, Seizes $52M

The Xinbi scam marketplace lost its wallets, its Telegram channels and its legal cover this week. The US Treasury Department sanctioned the Chinese-run platform on Wednesday, and the Justice Department restrained more than $52 million in crypto tied to Xinbi’s vendor network as part of a coordinated crackdown announced on September 10, 2026.

Justice Department Seizes Wallets Tied to the Xinbi Scam Marketplace

The DOJ’s Scam Center Strike Force said it seized two wallets Xinbi used to collect vendor payments, together holding close to $12 million. Investigators also sought court authorization to restrain 47 additional wallets believed to be tied to money laundering across the marketplace’s vendor network. That’s a lot of addresses for one Telegram-based operation to explain away.

The US District Court for the District of Columbia authorized the seizure of Telegram channels hosting Xinbi on Sept. 7, according to an unsealed warrant. Vendors reportedly used those channels to advertise money laundering services, custom-built scam-investment websites and recruitment for scam compounds across Southeast Asia. The Xinbi scam marketplace $52 million crypto seizure filing lays out the full scope of the marketplace’s alleged laundering infrastructure, wallet by wallet.

The operation reaches further than a single bad actor. Prosecutors are going after the financial and communications rails that let industrial-scale scam centers function at all, expanding enforcement from individual operators to the marketplaces and service providers underneath them. The DOJ credited stablecoin issuer Tether with assisting the investigation, an unusual point given how often stablecoin issuers get painted as the problem rather than part of the solution.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Weeks earlier, US and UK authorities launched a joint alliance specifically targeting crypto scam centers, a sign that enforcement agencies have stopped treating each marketplace bust as an isolated case and started building a standing task force model instead. Xinbi looks like the first big test of that alliance in action.

What Is Xinbi Guarantee and Why Did OFAC Sanction It?

Xinbi Guarantee is the Chinese-run marketplace the US Treasury Department‘s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Wednesday as a significant transnational criminal organization. The OFAC sanctions Xinbi Guarantee transnational criminal organization designation freezes Xinbi’s US property and interests and bars US persons from transacting with it, effective immediately.

Treasury said Xinbi has processed more than $24 billion in crypto and fiat since around 2022, primarily through Southeast Asia. That’s not a rounding error, that’s a payment rail. The department also said Xinbi’s platform has been used by North Korean hackers and by entities connected to the previously sanctioned Prince Group, tying one marketplace to two of the most-watched threat networks in crypto.

A transnational criminal organization designation isn’t a symbolic label. It puts Xinbi in the same regulatory bucket as cartels and human-trafficking networks, and it means any US bank, exchange or payment processor caught facilitating transactions with the platform risks its own enforcement exposure. The North Korea link matters too: Pyongyang’s hacking units have leaned on laundering networks like Xinbi’s before to move stolen crypto into usable cash, and the Prince Group connection ties this case to one of the largest scam-compound operators already under US sanctions. That’s the paper trail Treasury is betting will hold up.

SafeW Technology and Anwen Technology Sanctioned Too

OFAC didn’t stop at Xinbi. The agency also sanctioned Singapore-based SafeW Technology and Cambodia-based Anwen Technology for allegedly providing the technological and financial backbone Xinbi needed to keep operating. According to Treasury, Xinbi began shifting its merchant and money-laundering networks onto SafeW’s encrypted messaging app around June 2025, right as law-enforcement scrutiny started closing in.

Anwen’s alleged contribution was XinbiPay, also known as NewPay, a crypto wallet and payment app built specifically for the marketplace. The SafeW Technology and Anwen Technology sanctioned for Xinbi support action treats these vendors less like accessories and more like co-conspirators, which is a meaningful shift in how Treasury frames the supply chain around scam centers.

The migration to SafeW’s encrypted app in mid-2025 tells its own story. Xinbi wasn’t just running a marketplace, it was actively rebuilding its infrastructure in real time to stay a step ahead of investigators, swapping communication channels the way a fugitive swaps phones. Sanctioning the app provider alongside the marketplace closes off that escape route, at least until the next encrypted platform picks up the slack.

The Huione Playbook: Why This Looks Like Whack-a-Mole

Here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud enough: Xinbi didn’t build a $24 billion laundering rail from scratch. It inherited the customer base.

Call it whack-a-mole, call it Hydra economics, cut off one head and another grows within months, sometimes weeks. Huione’s implosion didn’t shrink the scam-compound economy in Southeast Asia. It just handed the keys to Xinbi, which reportedly moved north of $36 billion before regulators caught up. The uncomfortable question this sanctions package doesn’t answer: which platform inherits Xinbi’s customers next week?

Watch what happens to Xinbi’s $36 billion in historical volume over the next few months. Some of those funds already moved through exchanges, OTC desks and payment processors that never flagged the counterparty as high-risk. If Treasury’s designation triggers a wave of retroactive compliance reviews the way similar actions against Huione did, expect a lot of quiet freezes at exchanges that never appear in a press release.

OFAC sanctioned Xinbi for good reason. When Huione went down, Xinbi became the go-to escrow and cash-out layer for Southeast Asia’s scam compounds and did it at industrial scale, moving more than USD 36 billion.

UK Sanctions Came First, and the Network Isn’t Gone Yet

This isn’t Xinbi’s first sanctions rodeo. The UK government imposed sanctions on Xinbi back on March 26, 2026, freezing its UK-linked assets and barring the platform from Britain’s financial, trade and travel networks months before Washington moved. The UK sanctions Xinbi crypto marketplace notice reads almost like a preview of Wednesday’s US action, same target, different flag.

So what actually changes now? Xinbi’s US property is frozen and Americans can’t legally touch it. SafeW and Anwen face the same restrictions. But the underlying scam compounds in Southeast Asia, the recruiters, the custom-built investment-fraud sites, none of that infrastructure disappears because Treasury issued a press release. Sanctions freeze money. They don’t dismantle buildings full of trafficked labor running pig-butchering scripts.

Xinbi’s wallets are frozen. Whether its business model survives the week is a different question entirely.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Every investment and trading decision involves risk. Readers should conduct their own research before making any financial decisions.