The Largest Illicit P2P Marketplace in History Is Shut Down

Huione Guarantee (also known as Haowang Guarantee) operated as a P2P escrow marketplace across thousands of Chinese-language trading channels on Telegram. By the time it was shut down, it had processed more than $31 billion in crypto transactions — making it the largest illicit online marketplace ever recorded, roughly 143 times the volume of Silk Road (~$216 million) and 31 times AlphaBay (~$1 billion), Elliptic reports. A separate payments arm, Huione Pay, received at least $103 billion in crypto payments over its lifetime.

The key feature that explains its scale: the platform itself acted as guarantor (escrow) for every transaction between buyer and seller, which is exactly what made it trusted enough to reach that volume. Sellers offered money-laundering services (accepting payments from victims, cross-border transfers, converting to cash and stablecoins), traded stolen data, and sold tools for building fraudulent websites.

On May 13, 2025, Telegram removed Huione Guarantee's channels from its platform based on intelligence provided by Elliptic, forcing the largest illicit marketplace ever recorded offline. On June 24, 2026, the US Department of Justice landed the next blow, seizing a cloud account hosting backend services for entities tied to Huione. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva called it "one of the world's most prolific criminal marketplaces," while US Attorney Craig Missakian added: "We will not allow individuals or companies to exploit our country's technology to defraud hardworking Americans."

Put simply: this is exactly the scenario a regulated P2P platform with real escrow is designed to prevent — we've already covered how to trade P2P safely, and the core rule there is the same one at play here: a trade should run through the platform's built-in mechanism, not directly between the two sides. On legitimate exchanges, that mechanism protects the user; on marketplaces like Huione, it was instead the tool that let scammers operate at industrial scale.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.