UK Sanctions Hit a Crypto Platform Nobody Had Heard Of — Until Now

Somewhere in a network of Telegram channels — some with subscriber counts pushing 175,000 — a marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee has been quietly doing business for years. It’s not the kind of business that people talk about in polite conversation. Stolen personal data, satellite internet equipment for reaching scam victims across borders, money-laundering services priced and listed like ordinary goods on an ordinary storefront. The interface was Telegram. Cryptocurrency was used as payment. And the customers, by all accounts, were the people running some of the largest fraud operations on earth. On March 26, 2026, the UK became the first country to sanction it.

The announcement from Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office landed with the dry, procedural language that government press releases always use, listing entities and individuals, noting frozen properties, citing co-ordination with Cambodia and international partners.

But the numbers behind that language are anything but dry. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimates that Xinbi processed roughly $19.9 billion in transactions between 2021 and 2025. Elliptic, another crypto-tracing firm, puts the figure at $19.7 billion and notes that the vast majority of that money was almost certainly stolen from scam victims. That is not a niche criminal operation. That is an industrial-scale financial system, running in parallel to the legitimate one, largely invisible to most of the world until now.

The sanctions against Xinbi arrived alongside action targeting the operators of a Cambodian compound known as #8 Park — believed to be the largest scam facility in the country, with capacity to hold 20,000 workers. “Workers” is not quite the right word. These individuals were enticed across international borders with promises of respectable jobs, frequently in customer service or technology positions.

However, they were later imprisoned inside specially constructed compounds and coerced into running cryptocurrency investment fraud and romance scams under the threat of violence. Western financial coverage of cryptocurrency crime still fails to adequately highlight the horror of that setup. The scammers themselves are victims. The people making money are positioned several levels away, shielded by geography, logistics, and platforms such as Xinbi.

#8 Park’s operator, Legend Innovation Co., and its director, Eang Soklim, were both sanctioned. Thet Li and Hu Xiaowei, who used three different aliases, were among those connected to the Prince Group, a network that the US and the UK sanctioned last year after Chinese authorities arrested Chen Zhi, a suspected criminal mastermind.

A £100 million office block in the City of London, two multi-million-pound mansions, a helicopter, and now a £9 million penthouse are just a few of the properties in London that were frozen as a direct result of the new measures, adding to an already impressive list of UK assets seized in previous actions. The idea that the financial proceeds of fraud compounds in Southeast Asia were covertly building up in some of London’s most recognizable postal codes has a surreal quality to it.

The mechanics of what Xinbi actually accomplished show how advanced this ecosystem has become, so it’s worth taking a moment to consider what it actually did. It was more than just money laundering in the marketplace. It sold the raw materials needed to run scams on a large scale: satellite internet equipment that allowed compound operators to stay online even in remote locations, stolen personal data that allowed fraudsters to target victims by name and circumstance, and technical services to turn stolen funds into usable currency.

It used Telegram because it has historically been challenging for authorities to force Telegram into compliance, even in the face of sporadic enforcement actions. After WIRED reported on Telegram’s removal of Xinbi’s channels in May of last year, the marketplace continued to expand, eventually launching its own payment app, XinbiPay, and replicating infrastructure across other messaging platforms as a safeguard against precisely the kind of disruption the UK had just attempted.

The aspect that should worry people the most is that resilience. Following UK sanctions last year, BYEX, another cryptocurrency platform connected to the same network, shut down—a true success. However, the larger ecosystem has a history of swift adaptation.

These operations have essentially created their own banking infrastructure, independent of anything that Western regulators can readily access, according to one security researcher. During a Senate hearing last week, the FBI pointed out that reported losses from digital scams have increased by about 350 percent since 2019. In 2025 alone, there were 456,000 complaints and $17.7 billion in losses, and those are only the cases that people actually reported.

The purpose of the UK’s June Illicit Finance Summit is to advocate for more coordinated international action on precisely these issues: the flow of dirty money, its hiding places, and the jurisdictions that are prepared to take action. It’s difficult not to feel that the geography of this issue, which links a Telegram channel to a trafficking compound to a City of London office block, is still only beginning to become apparent to the governments attempting to address it, given that Britain has frozen London penthouses connected to Cambodian scam compounds. The money was constantly in motion. Whether anyone was paying close enough attention to follow it was the question.