The Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force, led by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, seized the Chinese-language scam marketplace Xinbi Guarantee and restrained approximately $52 million in cryptocurrency on September 7. The operation, authorized by a federal court in Washington, targeted Xinbi’s Telegram-based platform that facilitated fraud services. Treasury’s OFAC simultaneously designated Xinbi a transnational criminal organization. The action brings the Strike Force’s total restrained assets to roughly $938 million since its founding in November 2025.
The Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force, working with the Treasury Department, seized a Chinese-language scam marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee and restrained about $52 million in cryptocurrency in a single day, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced this week. The operation brought the total the Strike Force has restrained since its founding to roughly $938 million.
A separate Strike Force team also spent the same stretch helping authorities in Madagascar take down 13 Chinese-run scam compounds, pushing the crackdown launched last November well beyond its original footprint in Southeast Asia.
Xinbi ran almost entirely on Telegram, in Chinese, functioning as a marketplace where vendors advertised services to scam center operators. These services included building custom fraud investment websites, "washing" money stolen through wire fraud, and recruiting trafficking victims to staff scam compounds.
Xinbi held payments in escrow until a vendor finished the job, which is how prosecutors say they traced specific victim funds to vendors who posted wallet addresses on the channel. A federal court in Washington authorized the seizure of those Telegram channels on September 7, and prosecutors unsealed the warrant Wednesday.
Investigators seized two crypto wallets Xinbi used to collect vendor payments, worth roughly $12 million, and sought restraint of 47 more wallets tied to the network. The total taken from the platform and its vendors passed $52 million.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control separately designated Xinbi a transnational criminal organization the same day, along with two other entities accused of supporting it, freezing any property they hold in the U.S.
"Every American with a retirement account is in the blast radius," Pirro stated. "My Strike Force will continue to dismantle Chinese organized crime, those who facilitate it, and protect Main Street America."
U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman of Alaska said the Strike Force’s two-week Madagascar deployment, which helped process more than 3,200 devices and interview about 400 arrested people, reflects where the fight is headed. "Transnational criminal organizations don’t care about borders, and the Department of Justice won’t either," he said.
In March, the British government sanctioned Xinbi, with Chainalysis estimating the platform processed nearly $20 billion in crypto between 2021 and 2025. That earlier action barely slowed it down, with the group simply opening new Telegram channels.
Federal data cited in Wednesday’s announcement put reported crypto investment fraud losses at $8.65 billion in 2025, up 89% from $4.57 billion in 2023. The FBI says the figures are "significantly under-represented," since most fraud victims do not report.
