So there's this company in Cambodia that basically built Amazon for cybercriminals. On Telegram, the encrypted and anonymous app. It processed somewhere between $49 billion and $81 billion in transactions before anyone really did anything about it.

Let me walk you through this because it’s kind of alot,

Huione Group, a Cambodian financial company based in Phnom Penh. On the surface, it all looks totally legitimate. They've got Huione Pay for easy payments and banking stuff, Huione Crypto for cryptocurrency exchanges, some real estate, airline investments. Over all normal corporate stuff…

One of the directors is Hun To (pictured above). He's the cousin of Cambodia's current prime minister. Australian police have reportedly linked him to heroin trafficking, money laundering, and Chinese organized crime. So already, not great.

But the real important piece is this subsidiary called Huione Guarantee. This subsidiary is where all the interesting stuff is happening.

You know how eBay has buyer protection? Where they hold your money until you confirm you got the item? Huione Guarantee did that exact thing. Except for criminals. On Telegram.

Here's how a deal would go down. Say you're a scammer and you need to buy stolen credit card data. You hop on Telegram, find one of thousands of channels advertising this stuff. Browse around. Find a vendor selling 100 premium cards for $5,000.

You message them. Negotiate. Agree on terms.

Then you both use Huione Guarantee as the middleman. The seller creates a transaction through Huione's automated bot. The bot generates a unique crypto wallet address just for your deal. You send your $5,000 in USDT (that's a cryptocurrency) to that address.

The money sits there. Locked. The seller can't touch it yet.

Seller sends you the stolen credit card data. Usually as an encrypted file through Telegram. You check it. Make sure it's legit. If everything looks good, you hit confirm in the bot.

Boom. Huione releases the money to the seller. Takes their cut, usually 3-10%. Deal done.

Nobody used banks. No legitimate financial system. Just crypto moving through bots on an encrypted messaging app.

In May 1, 2025. US Treasury designated Huione Group as a primary money laundering concern and proposed cutting them off from the US financial system entirely.

Here’s a direct quote from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: "Huione Group has established itself as the marketplace of choice for malicious cyber actors who have stolen billions of dollars from everyday Americans."

In response, on May 13, Telegram deletes thousands of Huione channels and Bans the bad accounts.

But it only took three weeks for Huione to make its way back. VIP channels under new names. Crypto exchange re-emerged as a different website. Tudou Guarantee, where Huione bought a 30% stake in December 2024, doubled its user base in weeks and started processing the same volume Huione was before shutdown.

The operation didn't stop, It scattered.

The way Telegram is designed makes this easy. You can create a channel in minutes. No domain registration. No website hosting. Everything encrypted. So your channel gets deleted? Make another in minutes.

Blockchain analysts currently track over thirty active guarantee marketplaces that jumped in after Huione's first shutdown.

The infrastructure is redundant by design.

Cut off one head, two more grow back.