“Scam centers in Southeast Asia steal billions of dollars from American victims each year,” said Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, framing the Treasury’s action as part of a wider effort to dismantle overseas criminal enterprises.
OFAC designations: Xinbi Guarantee and two service providers
The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions targeting Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language marketplace the government says facilitated fraud, money laundering and other criminal activity. OFAC also designated two entities it identified as supporting Xinbi’s core operations: SafeW Technology, a Singapore-based provider of an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, and Anwen Technology, headquartered in Cambodia and the producer of the XinbiPay digital wallet app (also known as NewPay).
What Xinbi Guarantee offered and the Treasury’s scale estimate
The Treasury described Xinbi Guarantee as a marketplace that connects scam center operators in Southeast Asia and elsewhere with merchants offering financial services, technology and other products. The Treasury estimated that the marketplace has processed over $24 billion in digital currency and fiat currency since its inception in 2022.
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See what we buildTRM Labs’ assessment: listings, scale and supply shifts
Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs provided a more expansive description of the marketplace’s merchant listings, saying they included stolen personal data, fake identity documents, AI deepfake tools, satellite internet equipment, and over-the-counter crypto exchanges. TRM Labs wrote that “its services support scam operations that rely on trafficked foreign nationals, often lured with the promise of legitimate employment, to carry out online fraud at industrial scale.”
TRM Labs also suggested the platform’s true transaction volume may exceed the Treasury’s estimate, putting the figure at over $36 billion. The firm reported that daily inflows to the marketplace nearly doubled between May and December 2025 and that Xinbi benefited from the decline of other sanctioned marketplaces, specifically Huione Guarantee and Tudou Guarantee.
Asset freezes, takedowns and evidence of disruption
Announced alongside the sanctions, the US Secret Service and London-based blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic said they had identified and frozen $52.8 million in cryptoassets linked to Xinbi Guarantee. Elliptic warned that “merchants and users of these services will now be operating with the knowledge that their wallets may be identified and frozen at any time,” adding that this uncertainty “undermines the core mechanism these marketplaces rely on to function.”
Elliptic further reported that Xinbi Guarantee “now appears to be offline,” and that Telegram had deleted the main channels associated with the marketplace and banned usernames linked to it. The United Kingdom had previously sanctioned Xinbi Guarantee back in March.
What this means for technologists, policymakers, and victims
- Technologists and security teams: Firms that monitor blockchain flows, digital-wallet providers, and messaging-platform operators will be watching wallet-identification and takedown techniques used by law enforcement and intelligence partners—particularly the signals Elliptic and the Secret Service say led to the $52.8 million freeze.
- Policymakers and regulators: Treasury’s move and the earlier UK action illustrate coordinated use of financial sanctions and designations to target marketplaces and their service providers; regulators will be assessing whether similar targeting of encrypted-messaging or wallet providers is necessary or effective.
- Affected victims and the public: The Treasury’s public estimate of more than $24 billion processed since 2022, and TRM Labs’ higher estimate, underscore the scale of fraud operations that the agencies say rely on merchant ecosystems to buy stolen data, fake IDs and technical tools.
The action ties three strands together: a formal OFAC designation of a marketplace, parallel targeting of adjacent service providers, and operational activity that includes blockchain asset freezes and platform removals. The clearest near-term test of the effort will be whether wallets tied to the marketplace remain frozen, whether the listed service providers cease operations that support illicit trade, and whether Xinbi Guarantee stays offline after the reported channel removals on Telegram.
Original story: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ofac-sanctions-chinese-scam/
