Crypto scams have become a hugely profitable illegal industry, as most of the world probably knows, but the big news this month has been the naming of a Cambodian-Chinese platform allegedly used by multiple scammers in Asia.
Elliptic, a crypto-tracing firm, said last week that its researchers had found that
Huione Guarantee (“汇旺担保”) is part of Huione Group, a Cambodian conglomerate with links to Cambodia’s ruling family, it alleges, and the scale of the money involved is enormous: merchants have allegedly done $11 billion in transactions in the three years since it was set up, during the Covid-19 pandemic. That includes $3.4 billion this year.
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said Huione Guarantee claims to be a neutral platform with no responsibility for what is being sold.
“However the majority of the goods and services on offer today appear to be targeted squarely at cyber scam operators.”
‘A marketplace for scammers’
report launched in Bangkok last month by Jason Tower from the US Institute for Peace and other experts, who estimated that global scam earnings last year totalled about $64 billion.
Elliptic’s report has put a spotlight on a platform on which third-party merchants allegedly offer not only money laundering, but other services for this
“I’m not sure whether Huione Guarantee was originally established with this in mind, but it’s certainly become primarily a marketplace for online scammers,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s cofounder and chief scientist, was quoted as telling Wired.
Robinson said Elliptic knew of about 10 platforms like Huione Guarantee that are used by crypto scammers, but none were as big as it. “This is the largest public guarantee platform for illicit crypto transactions that we’re aware of,” he said.
The nasty part of this industry is the compounds that have been set up in semi-lawless places like Shwe Kokko on the Thai-Myanmar border, Sihanoukville in southern Cambodia, or the Golden Triangle SEZ in northern Laos, where thousands of job-seekers from dozens of countries have have been trafficked or lured to, and are then tortured and forced to engage in online scamming.
Elliptic said its researchers found “shock-enabled GPS tracking shackles and electric batons for sale” on the Huione Guarantee platform, used in the scam centres where enslaved victims are forced to work.
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