Chinese Crypto Scammers on Telegram Fuel Biggest Darknet Market Ever

When black markets For the drugs, weapons, and all manner of contraband that first appeared on the dark web more than a decade ago, cryptocurrencies and the technical sophistication of the Tor anonymization software seemed to be the key to executing untouchable illicit online transactions worth billions of dollars.

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. Despite a brief decline after Telegram banned two of the largest such marketplaces in early 2025, the two current major marketplaces, known as Tudou Daman and Xinbi Daman, together enable nearly $2 billion per month in money laundering transactions, sales of fraudulent tools such as stolen data, fake investment sites, and AI deepfakes, as well as other black market services as diverse as surrogacy and teen prostitution.

Cryptocurrency romance and investment scams, unfortunately known as “pig slaughter” — which are largely carried out in pools in Southeast Asia that house thousands of human trafficking victims — have evolved into the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They take in 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 was once the dark web’s largest marketplace for drugs, stolen data, and hacking tools. Described by the FBI as being ten times larger than the size of the original Silk Road dark web drug market at its peak, AlphaBay facilitated more than $1 billion in transactions over two and a half years online. Hydra, a Russian dark web marketplace that also provides money laundering services to cryptocurrency thieves and ransomware groups, has processed more than $5 billion in transactions over its 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. Elliptic simply described it as “the largest illicit online marketplace ever to operate.”