Huione Guarantee has transformed into a multi-billion cybercrime marketplace for online scammers, enabling various cyber scam operations, such as pig butchering scams and money laundering services.
Huione Guarantee is part of Huione Group, a Cambodian online marketplace with links to Cambodia’s ruling Hun family, including the country’s Prime Minister Hun Manet.
The platform offers deposit and escrow services for peer-to-peer transactions in USDT stablecoin over Telegram. The group operates Huione Pay app used for real estate, insurance, and airline transactions.
Cybercrime marketplace nets $11 billion from illegal activities
A report by crypto tracing firm Elliptic states that Huione Guarantee has collected about $11 billion from cyber scams, including so-called pig butchering, in three years, including $3.4 billion this year alone. The scheme involves convincing victims to invest in non-existent businesses with high returns only to realize they were scammed after committing a substantial amount.
However, not all the funds on the cybercrime marketplace could be linked to illegal activity. Nonetheless, the public advertisement for cybercrime activities and merchants’ willingness to facilitate money laundering, suggest that most funds originated from cybercrime activities.
“Manual analysis of thousands of messages across the Huione Guarantee platform has provided us with overwhelming evidence that its predominant role is to act as an illicit marketplace,” Ellipsis said.
While Huione Guarantee says it “does not participate in nor understand the specific business of customers,” Elliptic says it ignores users’ criminal activity.
Subsequently, the lack of moderation has allowed Huione Guarantee to transform into a cybercrime marketplace for laundering the proceeds of crime, such as sextortion, pig butchering, selling stolen personal data for targeting victims, producing deepfakes, and trading in torture and control equipment.
According to Elliptic, Huione Guarantee offering extends the whole cybercrime landscape. The blockchain analytics firm obtained conversations of users on the cybercrime marketplace openly discussing money laundering and trading in various illegal items, such as tear gas and electric shock collars for restraining exploited workers in Asian scam compounds. The firm observed a user requesting assistance to launder $2 million, which a Huione representative agreed to facilitate for a 10.5% fee.
“Our findings indicate that Huione Group not only facilitates cyber scams by operating the Huione Guarantee marketplace but also suggest that one of its subsidiaries is actively involved in laundering proceeds of these scams,” the report stated.
According to Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s cofounder and chief scientist, Huione Guarantee’s transformation into a cybercrime marketplace may be coincidental.
“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,” he said.
Robinson also noted that while around ten such cybercrime marketplaces exist in Asia, none are as big as Huione Guarantee. A recent report by the Reuters news agency stated that the cybercrime marketplace had received $150,000 from North Korea’s hacking group Lazarus.
Elliptic identified hundreds of cryptocurrency addresses scam operators use to prevent further money laundering. The firm also advised law enforcement to use its findings to pursue those responsible for cybercrime activities.
