\n<\/p>\n
When black markets<\/span> for drugs<\/a>, guns<\/a>, and all manner of contraband<\/a> first sprang up on the dark web<\/a> more than a decade ago, it seemed that cryptocurrency and the technical sophistication of the anonymity software Tor<\/a> were the keys to carrying out billions of dollars worth of untouchable, illicit transactions online.<\/p>\n Now, all of that looks a bit pass\u00e9. In 2025, all it takes to get away with tens<\/em> of billions of dollars in black-market crypto deals is a messaging platform willing to host scammers and human traffickers, enough persistence to relaunch channels and accounts on that service when they\u2019re occasionally banned, and fluency in Chinese.<\/p>\n The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop<\/a> after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market services as varied as pregnancy surrogacy<\/a> and teen prostitution.<\/p>\n The crypto romance and investment scams regrettably known as \u201cpig butchering\u201d<\/a>\u2014carried out largely from compounds in Southeast Asia staffed with thousands of human trafficking victims\u2014have grown to become the world\u2019s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They pull in around $10 billion annually from US victims alone, according to the FBI<\/a>. By selling money-laundering services and other scam-related offerings to those operations, markets like Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel to an immense scale.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you consider illicit use of crypto assets, there really isn\u2019t anything larger right now,\u201d says Tom Robinson, Elliptic\u2019s cofounder and chief scientist.<\/p>\n In fact, these criminal trading zones aren\u2019t simply the biggest online black markets of the moment, but the biggest in history. AlphaBay<\/a> was once the biggest dark-web market for drugs, stolen data, and hacking tools. Described by the FBI as 10 times the size of the original Silk Road<\/a> dark-web drug market at its peak, AlphaBay facilitated more than $1 billion in transactions over its two and a half years online. Hydra<\/a>, a Russian dark-web market that also offered money-laundering services to cryptocurrency thieves and ransomware groups, did more than $5 billion in transactions over its seven years of operation.<\/p>\n By comparison, Huione Guarantee, the Chinese-language, Telegram-based market used largely by crypto scammers, facilitated a stunning $27 billion in transactions from 2021 to 2025, according to Elliptic, dwarfing every online black market before it, even as it operated in full public view on Telegram\u2019s messaging platform. Elliptic has called it<\/a> simply \u201cthe largest illicit online marketplace to have ever operated.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n