The Justice Department's Scam Center Strike Force, working with the Treasury Department, seized the Chinese-language scam marketplace Xinbi Guarantee and restrained about $52 million in crypto in a single day. The action brings the Strike Force's total restrained crypto to roughly $938 million since it launched, while a separate team helped Madagascar authorities dismantle 13 Chinese-run scam compounds.
The Justice Department's Scam Center Strike Force seized the Xinbi Guarantee marketplace and restrained about $52 million in cryptocurrency in a single day, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced this week. The joint operation with the Treasury Department pushes the total the Strike Force has restrained since its founding to roughly $938 million.
A separate Strike Force team spent the same stretch helping authorities in Madagascar take down 13 Chinese-run scam compounds, extending a crackdown launched last November well beyond its original footprint in Southeast Asia.
Xinbi ran almost entirely on Telegram, in Chinese, functioning as a marketplace where vendors advertised services to scam center operators, including building fraud investment websites, laundering money stolen through wire fraud, and recruiting trafficking victims to staff scam compounds.
The platform held vendor payments in escrow until a job was finished, which prosecutors say let them trace specific victim funds to vendors who had posted wallet addresses on the channel. A federal court in Washington authorized the seizure of Xinbi's Telegram channels on September 7, and prosecutors unsealed the warrant Wednesday.
Investigators seized two crypto wallets Xinbi used to collect vendor payments, worth roughly $12 million, and sought restraint of 47 more wallets tied to the network, pushing the total taken from the platform and its vendors past $52 million.
The Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) separately designated Xinbi a transnational criminal organization the same day, along with two other entities accused of supporting it, freezing any property those entities hold in the United States.
Source: CryptoPotato
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