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Scammers in Ruins: Telegram Zaps $27B Black Market, Watch Where All the Crypto Bandits Go Next!

BBG News

In the vast, shadowy reaches of the digital steppe—a land equally favored by scammer and honest peasant alike—news dawned of a most peculiar phenomenon. Haowang Guarantee, the Genghis Khan of black markets, drunk on the spoils of crypto-fueled conquest, had finally been toppled by the unseen hand of Telegram’s mighty moderators. Over $27 billion in questionable treasures, transferred by the nimble fingers of anonymous tricksters, reduced to the sad inertia of a blocked channel. How swiftly the mighty telegram channel falls! Yet, how sullenly it protests in a press statement, lamenting the loss of its “NFT, Channels and group,” like a landlord complaining of rats after the sheriff has changed the locks.

According to the observant scribes at WIRED, whose persistent questions spilled more beans than a Russian grandmother upset at supper, the fall of this notorious bazaar was no accident. A fresh batch of findings from the blockchain oracles at Elliptic lit the fuse, exposing Haowang and its minor accomplice, Xinbi, to the cold glare of public attention—much like rats caught pillaging the neighbour’s larder. The Telegram czars, eager not to be mistaken as accomplices to such, exiled thousands of accounts overnight. Efficiency worthy of a Turgenev character with railway tickets! 🚂

“There is no room for scamming or money laundering on these sacred bytes!” thundered Remi Vaughn, the spokesperson of Telegram, which truly, is the kind of motto you’d print on a family crest—if your ancestors were software developers and not serfs.

Once known as Huione Guarantee—names multiply in criminal circles faster than snowflakes in Moscow—Haowang catered to a veritable buffet of dubious desires. Want to launder Tethers? Purchase someone’s grandmother’s identity? Acquire deepfake software to make your own Ivan Ivanovich seem like Catherine the Great? All for sale, brokered in icy digital silence. Vendors and buyers met via Telegram, their bargains “guaranteed” by a payment system with all the trustworthiness of a used bear pelt dealer in St. Petersburg.

Tom Robinson of Elliptic, eyes wide and voice trembling from equal measures relief and caffeination, proclaimed the event “a game changer.” A phrase so ubiquitous, one wonders if criminals keep a running count somewhere in their group chats.

“A huge win. The largest marketplace ever glimpsed in the digital tundra has been closed. Let the underworld mourn—though, as always, the cat will chase, and the mouse will scurry,” declared Robinson, likely while picturing himself in a double-breasted overcoat, standing against a snowbound skyline.

But let us not believe the story ends here, as if scandal and subterfuge could be so easily expunged! The scent of ill-gotten gains lingers, and already Haowang’s shrewd operators, with all the grace of exiled landowners scheming their return, urge their wandering flock toward yet another haven: Tudou Guarantee. That this new venture shares both clientele and administrators is less a surprise, more a time-honored Russian tradition—like swapping czars but keeping the same bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the mighty bureaucrats at the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—whose name alone commands the trembling of many a nervous banker—announced a new label for the Huione Group: Money Launderer Extraordinaire. Their plan: to cut off access to U.S. financial institutions, which, for purveyors of digital malfeasance, is much like denying Rasputin his vodka ration.

Even so, as anyone who’s read the Russian classics—or, frankly, just had a conversation with an unusually stubborn goat—will know, nothing vanishes in Russia, or the crypto underworld: it simply migrates, resurfaces, glowers. Haowang’s parent company, supported by political friends-of-friends in the highest echelons of Cambodian power, surely plots its resurrection, if not on Telegram, then perhaps on an obscure, decentralized corner of the Web—where rules are loose and pursuers tire quickly.

“This isn’t the end,” Robinson concluded, perhaps aware that life is, after all, a game of cat and mouse. Only in this game, the mice are particularly well-fed and suspiciously well-dressed. 🐭🎩

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2025-05-15 11:40

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