Treasury Sanctions a $24 Billion Scam Marketplace as It Flees Tether for a Rival Stablecoin

Every time US authorities cut off one of the marketplaces that supplies Southeast Asia’s scam compounds, the business moves somewhere else. On Wednesday the Treasury Department sanctioned the place it moved to.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language platform it called a transnational criminal organization, along with two companies that supply its tools. The Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force seized the marketplace’s infrastructure and digital-asset wallets the same day. Since roughly 2022, Xinbi has processed more than $24 billion in digital assets and fiat currency, according to Treasury, which said its users have reportedly included North Korean hackers and entities already under US sanctions.

“Scam centers in Southeast Asia steal billions of dollars from American victims each year,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the announcement.

Treasury was explicit about where Xinbi’s business came from. After the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network moved against Huione Pay, cybercriminals shifted to Xinbi’s marketplace, which “has continued offering substantially similar services to an overlapping customer base,” the department said.

Xinbi had also been moving to stay ahead of investigators. Around June 2025, in response to “growing law enforcement scrutiny,” it began migrating its merchants and money-laundering networks onto SafeW, an encrypted messaging app, and launched a wallet called XinbiPay. Both developers, Singapore’s SafeW Technology and Cambodia’s Anwen Technology, were designated on Wednesday too.

The squeeze started a day earlier. On Tuesday, 52 wallets holding $52.8 million in tether were frozen, working from intelligence the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic supplied to the Secret Service. The Justice Department seized two of them, holding about $12 million, under a warrant unsealed Wednesday. A district court had authorized the seizure of the Telegram channels hosting the marketplace on Monday, and Xinbi’s main channel was gone by Wednesday.

Xinbi’s operators did not go quietly. Administrators told users on Telegram that “Xinbi strongly condemns Tether’s arbitrary freezing of addresses,” according to Elliptic, and said they were moving to USDD, a Tron-based stablecoin with no comparable freeze switch.

Treasury has been working this beat for months, sanctioning a Cambodian senator over a pig-butchering network in April. Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office designated Xinbi in March.

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