Cambo-Chinese Firm Tied to Crypto Scams, Money Laundering

Crypto scams have become a hugely profitable illegal industry, as most of the world probably knows, but the big news this month has been the naming of a Cambodian-Chinese platform allegedly used by multiple scammers in Asia.

Elliptic, a crypto-tracing firm, said last week that its researchers had found that Huione Guarantee is a “multi-billion dollar marketplace used by online scammers” and that one of the group’s businesses “is actively involved in laundering proceeds of scams from around the world.”

Huione Guarantee (“汇旺担保”) is part of Huione Group, a Cambodian conglomerate with links to Cambodia’s ruling family, it alleges, and the scale of the money involved is enormous: merchants have allegedly done $11 billion in transactions in the three years since it was set up, during the Covid-19 pandemic. That includes $3.4 billion this year.

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Huione Guarantee has been described as “a deposit and escrow service for peer-to-peer transactions that lets users buy and sell over the Telegram messaging service with the cryptocurrency Tether” – USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin, which can be traced via blockchain, to ensure that they do not defraud each other.

Elliptic was allegedly able to trace the funds flows, but it said payment apps and bank transfers were also used. It said Huione Guarantee claims to be a neutral platform with no responsibility for what is being sold.

“However the majority of the goods and services on offer today appear to be targeted squarely at cyber scam operators.”

‘A marketplace for scammers’

Elliptic’s report has put a spotlight on a platform on which third-party merchants allegedly offer not only money laundering, but other services for this illegal ecosystem, such as production of deepfakes, website development for “pig butchering” scams, and items that can be used to track and subdue people held in forced labour sites.

“I’m not sure whether Huione Guarantee was originally established with this in mind, but it’s certainly become primarily a marketplace for online scammers,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s cofounder and chief scientist, was quoted as telling Wired.

Robinson said Elliptic knew of about 10 platforms like Huione Guarantee that are used by crypto scammers, but none were as big as it. “This is the largest public guarantee platform for illicit crypto transactions that we’re aware of,” he said.

The nasty part of this industry is the compounds that have been set up in semi-lawless places like Shwe Kokko on the Thai-Myanmar border, Sihanoukville in southern Cambodia, or the Golden Triangle SEZ in northern Laos, where thousands of job-seekers from dozens of countries have have been trafficked or lured to, and are then tortured and forced to engage in online scamming.

Elliptic said its researchers found “shock-enabled GPS tracking shackles and electric batons for sale” on the Huione Guarantee platform, used in the scam centres where enslaved victims are forced to work.

ALSO SEE:

Scamming Compounds in SE Asia Stole $64 Billion in 2023: Report

High-Tech Asian Crime Wave: Cyber Scams, Casinos Loot Billions

Big Tech ‘Doing Little’ to Counter Rampant Scams on Social Media

Macau Junket King Alvin Chau Gets 18 Years For Casino Crimes

Crime Gangs Control Some Myanmar, Laos Economic Zones: UN

Jim Pollard

Jim Pollard is an Australian journalist based in Thailand since 1999. He worked for News Ltd papers in Sydney, Perth, London and Melbourne before travelling through SE Asia in the late 90s. He was a senior editor at The Nation for 17+ years.