The Justice Department\u2019s Scam Center Strike Force, working with the Treasury Department, seized a Chinese-language scam marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee and restrained about $52 million in cryptocurrency in a single day, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced this week.\u00a0That operation brought the total the Strike Force has restrained since its founding to roughly $938 million.<\/p>\n
A separate Strike Force team also spent the same stretch helping authorities in Madagascar take down 13 Chinese-run scam compounds, pushing the crackdown launched last November well beyond its original footprint in Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n
Xinbi ran almost entirely on Telegram, in Chinese, functioning as a kind of marketplace where vendors advertised services to scam center operators: building custom fraud investment websites, \u201cwashing\u201d money stolen through wire fraud, and recruiting trafficking victims to staff scam compounds.<\/p>\n
Xinbi itself held payments in escrow until a vendor finished the job, which is how prosecutors say they were able to trace specific victim funds to vendors who posted wallet addresses on the channel.\u00a0A federal court in Washington authorized<\/a> the seizure of those Telegram channels on September 7, and prosecutors unsealed the warrant Wednesday.<\/p>\n 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, bringing the total taken from the platform and its vendors past $52 million.<\/p>\n The Treasury\u2019s 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 they hold in the U.S.<\/p>\n Pirro said the case shows why ordinary people are at risk:<\/p>\n \u201cEvery American with a retirement account is in the blast radius,\u201d she stated. \u201cMy Strike Force will continue to dismantle Chinese organized crime, those who facilitate it, and protect Main Street America.\u201d<\/p>\n Alongside the Xinbi action, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman of Alaska said the Strike Force\u2019s two-week Madagascar deployment, which helped process more than 3,200 devices and interview about 400 people who had been arrested, reflects where the fight is headed.<\/p>\n \u201cTransnational criminal organizations don\u2019t care about borders, and the Department of Justice won\u2019t either,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In March, the British government sanctioned<\/a> Xinbi, with Chainalysis estimating the platform had processed nearly $20 billion in crypto between 2021 and 2025, selling everything from stolen personal data to satellite equipment used to reach fraud victims.<\/p>\n That earlier action barely slowed it down, with the criminal group simply opening new Telegram channels and continuing with its operations.\u00a0The Strike Force itself dates to November 2025, when Pirro set it up to go after Chinese organized crime running scam centers.<\/p>\n Federal data cited in Wednesday\u2019s announcement put reported crypto investment fraud losses at $8.65 billion in 2025, up 89% from $4.57 billion in 2023, although the FBI says the figures are \u201csignificantly under-represented,\u201d since most fraud victims do not report.<\/p>\n The post DOJ Strike Force Seizes Scam Marketplace, Restrains $52M in Crypto<\/a> appeared first on CryptoPotato<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Justice Department\u2019s Scam Center Strike Force, working with the Treasury Department, seized a Chinese-language scam marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee and restrained about $52 million in cryptocurrency in a single day, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced this week.\u00a0That operation brought the total the Strike Force has restrained since its founding to roughly $938 million. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=226896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=226896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=226896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=226896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Xinbi\u2019s Long Run Before This Week<\/h2>\n