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The Internet’s Biggest-Ever Black Market Just Shut Down Amid a Telegram Purge
Following a WIRED inquiry, Telegram banned thousands of accounts used for crypto scam money laundering, including those of Haowang Guarantee, a black market that enabled over $27 billion in transactions.
The move comes in response to Telegram's action on Monday to ban thousands of accounts and usernames that served as the infrastructure for the sprawling marketplace of third-party vendors, many of whom provided money laundering and other services to the burgeoning industry of East Asian crypto scammers. Elliptic's latest findings concerned a second Telegram-based market known as Xinbi Guarantee, which offered a similar model of third-party transactions and had facilitated $8.4 billion in deals since 2022 that researchers say included not only money laundering for scammers, but also stolen data, harassment for hire, and apparent sex trafficking. "If so, I think that Telegram is no longer a realistic platform for these marketplaces and they'll have to look for somewhere else to operate.” He suggests the crypto scam market operators would then likely try to migrate to another messaging service with less oversight, or even a decentralized one where they can't be effectively banned.
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