Chinese Crypto Scammers on Telegram Fuel Biggest Darknet Market Ever

When black markets to Drugs, Gunsand All types of smuggling It was first brought up on Dark web More than a decade ago, it seemed that cryptocurrencies and the technical complexity of anonymity software Tor They were the keys to executing billions of dollars worth of untouchable illicit online transactions.

Now, that all seems a bit old-fashioned. In 2025, all it takes is impunity tens Billions of dollars in black market cryptocurrency trades A messaging platform willing to host scammers and human traffickers, enough tenacity to relaunch channels and accounts on that service when they are sometimes banned, and fluency in Chinese.

The ecosystem of Chinese-speaking cryptocurrency scammers hosted on messaging service Telegram is larger than ever, according to a new analysis by cryptocurrency tracking firm Elliptic. Although it declined briefly After Telegram banned two of the largest of these marketplaces in early 2025, the two current major marketplaces, known as Tudou Damana and Xinbi Damana, together enable nearly $2 billion per month in money laundering transactions, sales of fraudulent tools such as stolen data, fake investment sites, and deep AI tools, as well as various other black market services such as Surrogacy and teenage prostitution.

Crypto romance and investment scams Unfortunately known as “pig slaughter”— which is largely carried out in compounds in Southeast Asia staffed by thousands of victims of human trafficking — has grown into the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They make about $10 billion a year from American victims alone, According to the FBI. By selling money laundering services and other fraud-related offerings to these operations, markets such as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel on an enormous scale.

“When you think about the illicit use of crypto assets, there is nothing bigger right now,” says Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist at Elliptic.

In fact, these areas of criminal trade are not simply the largest online black markets today, but the largest in history. Alphabay It was once the dark web’s largest marketplace for drugs, stolen data, and hacking tools. The FBI described it as ten times larger than the original size Silk Road At the height of the dark web drug market, AlphaBay facilitated more than $1 billion in transactions over two and a half years online. Hydraa Russian dark web marketplace that also provides money laundering services to cryptocurrency thieves and ransomware groups, has conducted more than $5 billion in transactions over seven years of operation.

By comparison, Huione Assurance, the Telegram-based Chinese marketplace largely used by cryptocurrency scammers, facilitated a staggering $27 billion worth of transactions from 2021 to 2025, according to Elliptic, dwarfing every online black market before it, even when it operated fully openly on Telegram’s messaging platform. It has ellipticity Shoot it Simply put, “the largest illicit online market ever to operate.”