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Elliptic’s chief scientist Tom Robinson has called on stablecoin issuer Tether and encrypted messaging app Telegram to do more to stop an online scam industry estimated to have stolen $442 billion last year.
Robinson made the plea in an article he wrote for the Royal United Services Institute, a British security and defence think tank.
In the piece, Robinson calls on global regulators to demand greater accountability from messaging platforms and stablecoin issuers when it comes to tackling scams and the illegal marketplaces that rely on them.
He claims that the problem has reached “epidemic proportions,” and that an estimated $442 billion was lost to such scams in 2025.
Robinson also noted the humanitarian crisis that runs parallel, claiming that an estimated 300,000 trafficked workers are “held in these [scam] compounds, forced to commit online fraud under threat of torture, sexual violence and death.”
Within this industry, he says that firms like Tether and Telegram, and their ability to help launder online scam proceeds, are “becoming a foundational pillar of the modern global illicit economy.”
Vast Telegram-based guarantee marketplaces are key enablers of online scams. They rely on stablecoins for money laundering totalling hundreds of billions of dollars. In a new article for @RUSI_org (link below) I call on @telegram and @tether to step up and do more to combat this.
— Tom Robinson (@tomrobin) May 19, 2026
A scammer’s three major requirements are highlighted within the piece. This includes their need to find victims, their reliance on infrastructure to communicate and defraud said victims, and their ability to launder stolen funds.
He says “guarantee marketplaces,” which are online chat groups within messaging apps like Telegram, help facilitate these needs by selling illegal services.
Stolen data is sold to criminals looking for victim information, fake social media accounts are used to engage with victims, and mule bank services, which help launder funds, are advertised to criminals.
Payments are made with tether ($USDT), and are primarily found on the TRON blockchain. Robinson says, “This allows value to be transferred peer-to-peer, circumventing many of the anti-money laundering checks imposed by banks.”
Who are the biggest perpetrators?
Major examples of these guarantee marketplaces include Huione, Xinbi, and Todou. Between them, Robinson says they’ve facilitated roughly a combined $66.6 billion in payments.
Huione is described as the “largest” guarantee firm and is linked to the conglomerate Huione Group.
This firm was sanctioned last year by the UK and US and is also linked to payments firm Huione Pay, which is estimated to have processed $103 billion in $USDT transactions.
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Tudou Guarantee was a kind of rebrand for Huione Guarantee (which itself had renamed to Haowang Guarantee) after it was accused of being a “primary money laundering concern.”
Telegram began to ban Haowang Guarantee groups in May 2025 and, within criminal circles, merchants were encouraged to pivot to Tudou Gurantee. Huione Group also held a significant stake in Tudou.
However, Tudou began to shutter its operations in 2026 after pressure from Chinese law enforcement. The Xinbi Guarantee marketplace then filled this gap in the market and, according to Robinson, is handling $35 million per day.
Telegram also banned Xinbi channels in May 2025, but Robinson says it’s managed to circumvent the bans and just keep creating new marketplace channels.
He claims that the link between these scam marketplaces “is their reliance on services provided by two technology companies: Tether and Telegram. Telegram hosts the marketplaces while Tether provides the payment mechanism on which they depend.”
Robinsons says Telegram is doing the ‘bare minimum’
Robinson also says Xinbi has taken the lead in the scam industry. The UK sanctioned the firm in March 2026 for its role in human rights abuses and the operation of scam centers.
On X, he said that three weeks after the sanctions, Telegram was still hosting its marketplace channels.
After this, Telegram banned Xinbi for UK users, which Robinson described as the “bare minimum” it could do to comply with sanctions while “doing nothing to address the underlying issue.”
Protos has reached out to Elliptic for comment and will update this piece should we hear anything back.