The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday said it seized a cloud computing account used by subsidiaries of Cambodia-based HuiOne Group, while the Treasury imposed fresh sanctions on nine individuals and 26 entities linked to Prince Group. The account supported infrastructure behind a Telegram-based marketplace that handled billions of dollars in transactions between 2021 and 2025.
KEY FACTS
- Seizure The Justice Department took control of a cloud account used by HuiOne subsidiaries.
- Marketplace HuiOne Guarantee, also known as Haowang Guarantee, ran an illicit Telegram market.
- Services Merchants sold money laundering, stolen data, phishing tools and deepfake software.
- Money laundering The platform also offered escrow services for criminal transactions.
- Sanctions Treasury also targeted people and entities linked to Prince Group.
The seizure covered backend infrastructure used by HuiOne Guarantee and related services. The platform handled transactions linked to fraud, cyber scams and other criminal activity, and it helped move funds into the legitimate banking system without detection.
Elliptic’s July 2024 analysis said merchants on the market also sold tear gas, electric batons and electronic shackles for use in scam compounds. The company said those listings referred to victims and workers in abusive settings as part of efforts to prevent escape.
FinCEN separately assessed H-Pay Service PLC as a primary money laundering concern as U.S. authorities moved to block attempts to bypass earlier restrictions. The disclosure said HuiOne had received more than $31 billion in cryptoasset transactions before it was forced offline.
HuiOne said it stopped operating in May 2025, but Flare said more than 30 marketplaces have emerged since then to replace it. Those operators have shifted to proprietary messaging platforms after Telegram bans, showing how quickly the market adapted to enforcement pressure.
WHY IT MATTERS
The action targets both the financial and technical support behind large-scale scam networks that have hit U.S. victims. It also shows that enforcement can disrupt infrastructure, even as successor markets and new channels continue to appear.