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Guarantee Xinbi also hosted a wide range of other black market offerings, including harassment services that threatened or threw feces at the victim for a fee, and even sex workers as young as 14 who were potentially victims of trafficking. One listing Elliptic shared with WIRED, which was found in recent weeks, featured a 16-year-old sex worker, including the girl’s body size measurements and available sex acts.
As much as all of these examples contradict Telegram’s arguments for hosting Xinbi’s guarantee, the official sanctions imposed by the UK government against Xinbi are even clearer, says Elliptic’s Robinson. “It was already a weak argument,” Robinson says, “but punishing Shinpei makes the argument much weaker.” “There is now official recognition that Shinpei is mostly an illicit actor.”
Telegram’s tolerance of Xinbi’s guarantee is strange because in reality, The market was banned at one point last year. After WIRED asked Telegram about Elliptic’s findings regarding Xinbi Assurance and the larger marketplace at the time known as Huione Assurance, Telegram summarily purged the accounts of both. Telegram spokesperson Remy Vaughn wrote to WIRED at the time that “criminal activities such as fraud or money laundering are prohibited by Telegram’s terms of service and are always removed when detected.”
However, over the next month, Elliptic continued to share its findings about apparent money laundering activity in a Telegram group that included a WIRED reporter and a Telegram spokesperson. However, after the initial ban, Telegram did not remove any black market accounts highlighted by Elliptic, simply ensuring Xinbi It rebuilt its market Despite Telegram’s own statement that it violated the messaging platform’s terms of service.
Perhaps aware of its vulnerability to another ban on Telegram, Xinbi Security has asked its users to move to another platform called SafeW. But the vast majority of Xinbi’s Assurance activity has remained on Telegram, and Elliptic’s Robinson says the market will have difficulty transitioning users to SafeW. “Xinbi benefits from Telegram’s huge installed user base, something that would be very difficult for SafeW to replicate,” says Robinson.
For now, of course, Xinbi’s safeguard doesn’t have to go anywhere, with Telegram hosting its blatant criminal activity in plain sight. DarkTower’s Warner argues that this represents an unjustified lack of interest in Telegram’s enabling of Chinese-language black markets, both on the part of Telegram itself and on the part of law enforcement agencies around the world.
Warner points out that when Russian cybercriminals hosted black markets to sell malware and stolen data, international law enforcement coalitions targeted these criminals and their infrastructure, leading to frequent seizures and arrests. Given how frankly Telegram hosts a larger criminal ecosystem, the company and its founder and CEO Pavel Durov deserve the same treatment, Warner says. (In fact, Durov was arrested and charged in France in 2024, but has remained so since Released While the French government’s investigation is said to be ongoing.)
“It should be the subject of an international task force,” says Warner. “He must be hunted down and arrested. He must be held accountable.”