The Shadow Empire: How Haowang Guarantee Became Telegram's $27 Billion Scam Superhub

In the underbelly of the internet, where anonymity is currency and trust is a fatal flaw, Haowang Guarantee, once known as Huione Guarantee reigned supreme. Operating brazenly on Telegram, this Chinese language black market wasn't just another dark web flea market; it was a one stop empire for the world's most ruthless cyber scammers. From pig butchering romance frauds that drained retirees of their life savings to money laundering pipelines funneling billions in dirty crypto, Haowang powered an illicit ecosystem that experts call the largest of its kind in history. By the time Telegram slammed the door shut in May 2025, it had facilitated over $27 billion in transactions, leaving a trail of shattered lives and a stark warning: *the digital underworld doesn't die easily.
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The Rise of a Crypto Crime Cartel

Picture this: It's 2021, and Southeast Asia's scam factories are booming. In compounds hidden in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos often guarded like fortresses trafficked workers are coerced into running elaborate cons. Enter Haowang Guarantee, the brainchild of the Cambodia-based Huione Group. What started as a seemingly innocuous P2P payments app evolved into a sprawling Telegram marketplace, complete with escrow services, vendor ratings, and NFT backed usernames for "premium" listings. No KYC required, just pure, pseudonymous chaos.

Haowang's genius lay in its vertical integration. Scammers didn't just buy tools; they built entire operations. Vendors hawked everything from deepfake software to generate convincing video calls for romance scams, to fake ID kits for impersonating executives, to telecom gear for setting up bogus call centers. One chilling category? Physical restraints and surveillance equipment, marketed explicitly for use in "scam compounds" where victims often kidnapped migrants, were forced to toil under threat of violence. As blockchain analytics firm Elliptic documented in a mid 2023 report, Haowang's daily transaction volume hit $16.4 million at its peak, mostly in Tether (USDT), the stablecoin of choice for laundering because it's fast, borderless, and hard to trace.

The numbers are staggering. From August 2021 to January 2025, the Huione Group's broader network processed over $4 billion in illicit funds, including $37 million from North Korean Lazarus Group hacks and $300 million from "pig butchering" schemes targeting Americans. Pig butchering? It's the scammer's dark art: Build a fake online romance, "fatten up" the victim with trust, then "butcher" them by luring them into bogus crypto investments. Haowang didn't invent the scam, but it supercharged it, providing stolen personal data for targeting high-net-worth marks and laundering services to clean the proceeds.

And the ties run deep. Investigative reports linked Huione's director, Hun To, to Cambodia's political elite specifically, as a cousin to Prime Minister Hun Manet. Whispers of heroin trafficking and prior money laundering swirled, though no charges stuck. In January 2025, Huione even launched its own stablecoin, USDH, and a proprietary chat app to wean off Telegram dependency. Too little, too late. By then, the U.S. Treasury's FinCEN had blacklisted the group, branding it a "marketplace of choice for malicious cyber actors" and severing its U.S. financial lifelines. Google Play yanked the app, and Cambodia's central bank revoked Huione Pay's license. But Haowang? It just kept humming along on Telegram's lax oversight.

Inside the Bazaar: A Catalog of Cyber Nightmares

Step into a Haowang channel (before Telegram's ban), and it's like browsing Alibaba for apocalypse prep. Vendors, often operating under handles like "LaunderKing88" or "DeepfakeMaster," posted glossy ads with escrow guarantees to build buyer confidence. Here's a snapshot of the horrors on offer:

Category	Sample Offerings	Real-World Impact
Money Laundering	USDT mixing services (1-5% fee), fake P2P trades to "legitimize" funds	Fueled $27B+ in scam proceeds; victims lost billions to untraceable crypto drains
Stolen Data & IDs	Batches of 10,000+ emails/phones ($50), forged passports ($200)	Enabled targeted phishing; one vendor sold data from 2024 U.S. breaches
Scam Tech	Pig-butchering scripts ($100/month), deepfake voice/video tools ($500)	Powered 70% of Southeast Asian romance scams; deepfakes fooled victims for months
Compound Essentials	Zip ties, CCTV kits, "motivational" tasers ($300/set)	Equipped forced-labor sites holding 100,000+ trafficked workers
Exotic Extras	Harassment-for-hire ($1,000/target), sex trafficking leads (via Xinbi sister site)	Linked to human rights abuses; posts advertised "students, queens, lolita"

Elliptic's researchers, posing as buyers, uncovered over 2,000 Telegram channels feeding into Haowang's network. One post boasted: "Launder your pig-butchered gains in 24 hours guaranteed or refund!" It wasn't hyperbole. The platform's "guarantee" system held funds in escrow until delivery, mimicking legit eBay but for evil. By 2025, Haowang boasted 233,000 users, dwarfing even the infamous Silk Road in scale. As Tom Robinson, Elliptic's co-founder, put it: "This was the Amazon of cybercrime it was efficient, user friendly, and devastating."

The human cost? Heart wrenching. A 68 year old California widow lost $1.2 million to a Haowang fueled romance scam in 2024, her "suitor" using deepfakes to seal the con. Across the U.S., victims reported $3.5 billion stolen that year alone. In Asia, the compounds Haowang supplied became hellish prisons, with escapees describing beatings and suicides. One X post from a survivor: "They sold the chains that held us. Haowang didn't just enable scams, they enabled slavery."

The Fall: Telegram's Reluctant Reckoning

Haowang's empire cracked under a perfect storm. In early May 2025, Elliptic's bombshell report on sister site Xinbi Guarantee ($8.4B in transactions) caught WIRED's eye. The outlet pinged Telegram: "What's up with these scam bazaars on your app?" Days later, on May 13, Telegram unleashed the ban hammer thousands of accounts, channels, and NFT usernames vaporized. Haowang's terse farewell on its website: "Telegrame were blocked all of our NFT, Channels and group on May 13th 2025, Haowang Grarantee will cease operation from now." Typos and all, it was over.

Telegram's Remi Vaughn spun it clean: "Criminal activities like scamming or money laundering are forbidden... and always removed whenever discovered." But critics called BS. Why did it take years? Telegram's end to end encryption and billion plus users make moderation a nightmare, but rivals like Signal manage. Plus, Haowang's shutdown came hot on FinCEN's heels coincidence? On X, users vented: "Telegram finally acts after $27B stolen? Too late for the victims."

Whack-a-Mole: The Resurrection and the Road Ahead

Victory lap? Hardly. Chainalysis dropped a reality check weeks later: "The enablers remain intact." Vendors scattered like roaches, rebuilding on Telegram under aliases like Tudou Guarantee. By June 2025, Tudou was moving $15 million daily nearly Haowang's old clip peddling the same poisons. Elliptic's follow up: The ecosystem "bounced back," with new markets filling the void faster than regulators can blink. X chatter echoed the frustration: "Telegram nukes Haowang, Tudou pops up. Whack-a-mole with billions on the line."

So, what's next? Experts like Robinson urge on chain sleuthing tools that trace USDT flows in real time and global crackdowns on enablers like Tether. But with crypto's anonymity baked in, Haowang's ghost haunts every Telegram ping. It wasn't just a platform; it was a symptom of a Wild West web where privacy shields predators. As one Chainalysis analyst quipped: "We killed the king, but the kingdom lives."

Haowang's saga is a thriller with no happy ending yet. For now, it stands as Telegram's ugliest scar, a $27 billion monument to unchecked digital greed. Stay vigilant, folks. The next channel invite might not be from a friend.