Crypto World
DOJ targets Xinbi Guarantee network, restrains over $52M in crypto
US authorities have restrained more than $52 million in cryptocurrency tied to Xinbi Guarantee and its vendor network while seizing wallets and Telegram channels used by the Chinese-language marketplace.
Summary
- US authorities restrained more than $52 million in crypto linked to Xinbi Guarantee and its vendor network.
- The DOJ seized two wallets holding roughly $12 million and sought restraints against another 47 wallets tied to suspected money laundering.
- US authorities seized Telegram channels where Xinbi vendors advertised money laundering, scam websites and recruitment services for Southeast Asian scam compounds.
- OFAC sanctioned Xinbi, SafeW Technology and Anwen Technology over their alleged roles in supporting the marketplace.
The US Department of Justice said on Sept. 9 that its Scam Center Strike Force seized two crypto wallets containing approximately $12 million and sought restraints against another 47 wallets believed to be connected to money laundering through Xinbi and vendors serving scam operators.
The two seized wallets were used by Xinbi to collect payments for vendors operating through its marketplace. Combined with the other restraints, the operation placed more than $52 million in crypto beyond the reach of Xinbi and its vendor network, according to the DOJ.
Tether assisted investigators with the operation, the department said. The stablecoin issuer had separately frozen $39.3 million in USDT across 10 Tron addresses linked to Xinbi earlier this week, crypto.news previously reported.
US seizes Xinbi wallets and Telegram channels
Court action against Xinbi extended beyond its cryptocurrency infrastructure.
On Sept. 7, the US District Court for the District of Columbia authorized the seizure of Telegram channels hosting the marketplace. A subsequently unsealed warrant described Xinbi as a Chinese-language marketplace where vendors advertised services to operators of scam centers.
According to the DOJ, the services included laundering money stolen through wire fraud, building custom websites for fraudulent investment schemes and recruiting workers for scam compounds in Southeast Asia.
Xinbi served as an intermediary in transactions between vendors and their customers. The marketplace held funds intended for vendors until the purchased services had been delivered, providing an escrow system for transactions arranged through the platform.
Investigators said funds belonging to US victims were traced to specific vendors that advertised money laundering services and posted cryptocurrency addresses for payments in Xinbi’s Telegram channels.
The enforcement action came after Xinbi continued operating despite previous attempts to remove its communications infrastructure. Telegram removed thousands of channels connected to Xinbi and Huione Guarantee in May 2025, but TRM Labs found that both networks began resurfacing under new channels and names soon afterward.
Xinbi subsequently moved parts of its operation away from Telegram as scrutiny of guarantee marketplaces increased.
Treasury sanctions Xinbi Guarantee and two technology providers
Alongside the DOJ operation, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Xinbi as a significant transnational criminal organization.
OFAC described the marketplace as a service connecting transnational criminal groups and scam center operators with merchants providing technology, financial services and other products used in cybercrime.
Treasury data put the value of digital asset and fiat transactions processed through Xinbi and its associated platforms at more than $24 billion since the marketplace emerged around 2022. Much of the activity took place in Southeast Asia.
Earlier estimates had put Xinbi’s transaction volume lower as blockchain investigators identified more addresses tied to the operation. TRM Labs estimated in February that Xinbi had processed approximately $17.9 billion since mid-2025 as activity continued despite enforcement against Telegram-based marketplaces.
OFAC said Xinbi’s platform has been used by North Korean hackers and several previously sanctioned entities, including companies linked to Cambodia’s Prince Group.
US prosecutors have accused Prince Group and its chairman, Chen Zhi, of operating a network involving crypto investment fraud, money laundering and forced-labor scam compounds. Authorities previously sought forfeiture of more than 127,000 Bitcoin connected to Chen and his associates in a case that involved one of the largest Bitcoin seizure actions pursued by US authorities.
Prince Group has denied allegations against the company.
SafeW and Anwen sanctioned over Xinbi services
OFAC sanctioned two technology companies accused of providing services that supported Xinbi’s operations.
Singapore-based SafeW Technology developed SafeW, an encrypted messaging application that Xinbi began using for its merchant and money laundering networks around June 2025, according to the Treasury.
The move came as law enforcement attention on Xinbi increased. Users were encouraged to use SafeW to coordinate transactions between buyers and sellers, reducing the marketplace’s reliance on Telegram.
Cambodia-based Anwen Technology developed XinbiPay, which was also known as NewPay. Treasury described the product as a cryptocurrency payment and digital wallet application used by Xinbi.
TRM Labs had previously documented Xinbi’s move toward SafeW and XinbiPay as the marketplace rebuilt its infrastructure following disruptions to Telegram channels. On-chain data reviewed by the blockchain intelligence company showed a brief drop in Xinbi activity in December 2025 before transaction flows rebounded in early 2026.
OFAC designated SafeW Technology and Anwen for materially assisting or providing financial, technological or other support to Xinbi.
The sanctions require property and interests belonging to the three designated entities that are in the United States or controlled by US persons to be blocked and reported to OFAC. Entities owned 50% or more by blocked persons are subject to the same restrictions.
Transactions involving their property are generally prohibited for US persons unless exempt or authorized by OFAC.
Xinbi expanded after pressure on rival marketplaces
Xinbi’s development into a major guarantee marketplace accelerated as authorities and technology companies targeted other networks used by Southeast Asian scam operations.
Blockchain investigators have described guarantee marketplaces as escrow-based platforms where merchants advertise services ranging from money laundering and payment processing to stolen information and infrastructure used by online scammers.
Huione Guarantee, later known as Haowang Guarantee, had become one of the largest networks operating under the model before Telegram shut down its marketplace in May 2025.
Treasury said cybercriminals moved parts of their activity toward Xinbi after US authorities targeted Huione Pay. Xinbi continued offering similar services to an overlapping customer base.
The UK had already targeted Xinbi on March 26, when the government sanctioned the marketplace over its alleged role in scam and money laundering operations. The restrictions froze assets connected to Xinbi in the UK and cut designated parties off from the country’s financial system.
The latest DOJ operation formed part of the Scam Center Strike Force’s campaign against networks supporting overseas scam compounds. The unit was launched in November 2025 to investigate cryptocurrency investment fraud, cyber-enabled fraud, human trafficking and money laundering tied to scam centers.
According to the DOJ, the Strike Force has now restrained approximately $938 million linked to scam money laundering operations.
Its work has expanded outside Southeast Asia. A Strike Force team recently spent two weeks in Madagascar assisting local authorities with the takedown of 13 scam centers allegedly operated by Chinese organized crime groups.
Investigators helped process more than 3,200 electronic devices recovered during the operation and interviewed people among nearly 400 arrests. The DOJ said approximately 30 of those arrested were Chinese leaders of the scam compounds who were later repatriated to China by the Chinese government.
The SEC’s new proposal to overhaul transfer-agent rules could eliminate duplicate offchain shareholder records, reducing reconciliation costs and legal uncertainty for tokenized securities.
Pay close attention to a spot that appears suddenly; changes in size, shape, or color; becomes raised; or starts itching, bleeding, crusting, or refusing to heal. Dufner also recommends using the “ugly duckling” rule: If one spot simply looks different from all of its neighbors, it deserves professional attention.
“If your eye keeps being drawn to a spot because something about it seems different or unfamiliar, it’s worth having it examined,” Ilyas says. Dermatologists can inspect it with a dermatoscope, which reveals patterns and features that aren’t visible to the naked eye. If necessary, they can biopsy it.
How to fade age spots at home
Once a dermatologist has confirmed you’re dealing with harmless age spots, you can try fading them at home. Just prepare to be patient: Topical treatments are “a slow game—think months, not days,” Dufner says.
Prescription retinoids and azelaic acid are among the strongest topical options, she says. Over-the-counter products containing vitamin C, niacinamide, kojic acid, arbutin, glycolic acid, tranexamic acid, or thiamidol may also gradually lighten the spots. Hydroquinone can be effective, but it’s best used under a dermatologist’s supervision; prolonged overuse can cause a difficult-to-treat blue-black discoloration called exogenous ochronosis.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has backed the CLARITY Act once again ahead of its September 15 Senate vote.
He argued that the bill could give US crypto markets a clearer framework and help bring institutional capital and tokenized assets into the country.
Armstrong Lays Out His Case for a Yes Vote
Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia on September 10, Armstrong described the CLARITY Act as “ready to get a yes vote” and told viewers that people he had spoken with in the Senate were on board.
“Law enforcement groups are now on board. Many banks are on board. The crypto companies are on board,” he said, while also pointing to hundreds of pages of input from both Republicans and Democrats.
The Coinbase chief also noted that his company had previously raised concerns about the bill but now believes the issues it considered non-negotiable changes have been sorted.
“All of those must-have issues that we raised our hands on last time have now been resolved,” he said.
As CryptoPotato reported in August, Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture before the lawmakers went on recess, setting September 15 as the date for the procedural vote. The measure needs 60 votes, meaning Republicans cannot pass it without support from at least seven Democrats or independents.
The political negotiations also include ethics provisions covering digital-asset holdings and projects linked to elected officials, including President Donald Trump.
Armstrong characterized the White House proposal as containing “very strong” ethics provisions, while Democrats have sought additional measures, including divestiture. He added that the discussions appeared to be close to a solution, calling the issue one of the last pieces to fall into place.
The crypto executive also drew a link between regulatory clarity and institutional adoption. Pointing to the GENIUS Act, he noted that more than 150 large companies integrated stablecoins within three months of its passage.
In his view, CLARITY could act as a regulatory “checkbox” for institutional investors and help bring tokenized equities and perpetual contracts to the US. According to Armstrong, even if the bill doesn’t pass, the alternative is already taking shape through the SEC and CFTC.
Last month, he predicted that clarity would arrive through either congressional action or agency rules, after CFTC Chairman Michael Selig had earlier outlined how the agency could use its existing authority to establish a crypto trading framework if Congress stayed deadlocked. Armstrong therefore framed September 15 as a decision point rather than the only route to new rules.
Bitcoin to $400,000 by 2030
He also connected the regulatory debate to broader financial conditions, arguing that excessive government spending can push investors toward Bitcoin “almost like gold.” Furthermore, he pointed to regulated stablecoins as structural buyers of US government debt, creating demand for Treasury bills and potentially helping lower rates.
On Bitcoin itself, Armstrong maintained that $400,000 by 2030 remains a reasonable target. He believes the cryptocurrency’s one-year downturn may have already reached its bottom, noting that the next halving is about a year and a half away and that previous market run-ups have tended to come right before those events.
“I think the next year or two is going to be good for Bitcoin,” he stated.
The post Coinbase CEO Backs CLARITY Act to Secure ‘Yes’ Vote on September 15 appeared first on CryptoPotato.
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Soon, any human community will be able to bring into existence a machine counterpart. Picture cultures of AI lawyers, consultants, terrorist cells—working together, what monuments might 10,000 agents create in honor of some beloved K-pop star? And machine communities may well arise of their own accord, organizing around ideas hard to predict.
We make art for all sorts of reasons: to express ourselves, exchange meaning, impress one another. We tell stories—like The Odyssey—to encode and share sets of cultural values. Though the mediums may differ, agents in machine cultures are poised to do the same. Being alive may not be necessary for self-expression.
The UK House of Lords backed an amendment requiring the government to develop a digital asset strategy, in a 194–138 vote on Wednesday, despite the Labour government’s opposition to the measure.
The amendment was added to the Financial Services and Markets Bill during its Report Stage on Wednesday. The bill is progressing through Parliament and would make broader changes to the UK’s financial services regulatory framework.
Amendment 88, introduced by Conservative peer Baroness Neville-Rolfe, would require the Treasury to prepare, publish and consult on a digital asset strategy within 12 months of the Financial Services and Markets Bill becoming law.
The strategy would cover cryptoassets, stablecoins and tokenized securities, while addressing issues including innovation, consumer protection and firms’ access to banking, payment and settlement services.
The vote follows months of debate over the UK’s approach to digital assets. During a July debate, Treasury’s Minister for Investment, Lord Stockwood, pushed back on calls for a statutory framework, saying the government believed it already had a digital asset strategy and was executing it.
The ruling Labour party opposed the amendment because they believed it did not adequately address the rapid development of digital assets and the need for a cohesive regulatory framework.
The UK Cryptoasset Business Council, which said it worked with lawmakers on the amendment, welcomed the vote on Thursday, highlighting Lord Chris Holmes’ question of whether the UK is “simply regulating digital assets” or “building a digital assets economy.”
The bill must still return to the House of Commons, where lawmakers can accept, amend or reject the Lords’ changes.
Almost every large crypto token fell through the overnight sessions and into Thursday's U.S. open, as an oil shock drove long-dated Treasury yields to multi-year highs and traders raised the odds of a Federal Reserve rate increase next week to 64%. Traders put a quarter-point September increase at… Read the full story at The Defiant
“We know that voters are going to turn to chatbots more and more,” said Valeria de la Fuente, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who recently co-authored a report on election-related misinformation from chatbots. “So the quality of the responses that we found is concerning.”
Google’s new election policy is a less cautious stance than the one the company took in 2022 and 2024 when it blocked Gemini from answering certain election-related questions, pushing users to seek answers from Google search instead.
“People come to Google to stay informed during election season—like when finding their polling site, watching candidate debates, or tracking results on election night,” the company said in Wednesday’s blog post. “We take the responsibility to deliver high quality, trustworthy information seriously.”
Other tech companies have taken similar approaches. Both OpenAI and Anthropic said their chatbots would direct users to voting information from the nonprofit Democracy Works. OpenAI also plans to provide live vote counts from The Associated Press, and monitor its systems for signs of political bias. Meta spokesman Corey Chambliss said when MetaAI users ask about voting and participating in elections, the service will give them local information or direct them to government sources.
OpenAI is taking aim at some of Wall Street’s most labor-intensive tasks with a new version of ChatGPT designed to research companies, analyze financial data and generate the presentations that investment bankers rely on.
The product unveiled Thursday, called ChatGPT for Financial Services, is a tailored version of its enterprise product, ChatGPT Work, that was made with “design partners” Morgan Stanley and Evercore, according to OpenAI’s Vice President of Product, Nick Turley. It uses the AI company’s latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra.
The rollout puts OpenAI deeper into territory traditionally occupied by Wall Street’s entry-level bankers, the recent college graduates called analysts and associates that the industry has employed for decades to research deals and create pitchbooks. It also showcases the company’s continued push into enterprise offerings as it gears up for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO.
“We’re effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well,” Turley said during a briefing announcing the new product.
OpenAI has spent much of the last year racing to win over business customers in the fiercely competitive enterprise market, where it’s working to fend off rivals including Anthropic and Google. Anthropic announced its own tailored solution for Wall Street, Claude for Financial Services, last year.
Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s finance chief, told investors in August that the company’s enterprise business accounted for more revenue than its consumer business, which took off following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
Turley told reporters during the briefing OpenAI plans to release tailored solutions for “a number of sectors” beyond financial services.
In a live demonstration of the new offering, Turley showed the platform analyzing a potential M&A target, pulling financial figures from industry-standard data sources and creating a formatted PowerPoint deck based on a bank’s preformatted style guide.
“It’s very easy to make slides that look good, but it’s much harder to make slides [that] actually make sense,” Turley said. “To get here, ChatGPT had to choose the relevant peers. It had to pull the prices into a spreadsheet. It had to check the chart against the data, and it had to explain the selloff and the rebound.”
Banker disruption?
What separates this version from the product it’s based on, ChatGPT Work, is native data access from LSEG, Daloopa and Pitchbook that furnishes the system with things like financial statements and earnings transcripts, as well as automated access to users’ existing data subscriptions.
Other features tailor-built for finance include citations that allow users to trace data back to source filings and audit charts, as well as administrative controls for sensitive deal materials.
While Turley said that there was “a ton of demand” for this version of ChatGPT, which is initially geared toward investment banking and equity research, he declined to name banks that have signed on for it.
When asked by CNBC whether this latest version of ChatGPT would reduce the need for investment banks to hire junior bankers, Turley framed the release as an efficiency boost that maximizes productivity per employee.
“If you study the life of an analyst or of a banker, depending on the industry, they’re working 100-hour weeks,” Turley said. “I think in the same way that Microsoft Excel transformed the industry and allowed them to produce better analysis faster, you will see technology like this do the same.”
Still, the product raises fundamental questions for an industry long built on a rigorous apprenticeship model. If generative AI can execute multistep tasks like research and pitchbook formatting in minutes, Wall Street will be forced to rethink how it trains, and how many it needs, of its next generation of dealmakers.
Last month, Chris Churchman, the Goldman Sachs partner in charge of one the bank’s flagship AI projects, warned that the automation of tasks that help train junior bankers risks causing “cognitive atrophy” in the next generation of financiers.
“Reasoning is still important,” Churchman said at the time. “You still need to reason about [problems] and structure it into an argument, and now we’re delegating reasoning.”
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