The Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force, working with the Treasury Department, raided a fraudulent Chinese-language marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee and seized approximately $52 million in cryptocurrency in a single day, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced this week. This operation brought the total that the Strike Force has retained since its inception to approximately $938 million.
A separate Strike Force team also spent the same period helping Malagasy authorities dismantle 13 Chinese-run fraud complexes, pushing the crackdown launched last November well beyond its initial footprint in Southeast Asia.
Inside the dismantling of Xinbi
Xinbi ran almost entirely on Telegram, in Chinese, functioning as a sort of marketplace where sellers advertised their services to scam hub operators: creating custom fraudulent investment websites, “washing” stolen money through wire fraud, and recruiting trafficking victims to hire scam complexes.
Xinbi itself held the payments in escrow until a vendor completed the work, which is how prosecutors say it was able to trace victims’ specific funds back to the vendors who posted the wallet addresses on the channel. A federal court in Washington allowed seized those Telegram channels on September 7, and prosecutors unsealed the warrant on Wednesday.
Investigators seized two crypto wallets used by Xinbi to collect payments from vendors, worth approximately $12 million, and requested the seizure of 47 other wallets linked to the network, bringing the total removed from the platform and its vendors to more than $52 million.
The same day, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) separately designated Xinbi as a transnational criminal organization, alongside two other entities accused of supporting it, effectively freezing any assets they hold in the United States.
Pirro said this case shows why ordinary people are in danger:
“Every American with a retirement account is in the blast radius,” she said. “My strike force will continue to dismantle Chinese organized crime, those who enable it, and protect Main Street America. »
Along with the action against Xinbi, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman of Alaska said the Strike Force’s two-week deployment to Madagascar, which processed more than 3,200 devices and questioned about 400 arrestees, reflects the direction the fight is heading.
“Transnational criminal organizations don’t care about borders, and neither does the Department of Justice,” he said.
The long journey of Xinbi before this week
In March, the British government sanctioned Xinbi, with Chainalysis estimating that the platform had processed nearly $20 billion in crypto between 2021 and 2025, selling everything from stolen personal data to satellite equipment used to reach fraud victims.
This earlier action barely slowed it down, with the criminal group simply opening new Telegram channels and continuing their operations. The Strike Force itself dates from November 2025, when Pirro created it to take on Chinese organized crime running scam centers.
Federal data cited in Wednesday’s announcement puts reported losses related to crypto investment fraud at $8.65 billion in 2025, up 89% from $4.57 billion in 2023, although the FBI says the numbers are “significantly underrepresented” since most fraud victims do not report.
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