U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro on Wednesday announced that the Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force busted an illicit Chinese marketplace wide open.
During a press conference, Pirro said these marketplaces that are run by transnational criminal organizations “are stealing, conning, and scamming Americans out of their life savings.”
She said the DOJ has “made enormous strides in fighting a previously unknown and unidentified network of overseas criminals who are focused on us and our money.”
Pirro further explained that these groups use U.S. platforms, banks, and victims as the product and characterized it as “a generational wealth transfer from Main Street America to Chinese organized crime.”
“And they are staffed with human trafficked labor,” she continued. “These are not basement scammers. These are factories. They are compounds that have quotas, shifts. They beat the people working there, and they even have balance sheets.”
Now, President Trump made this a priority in March of 2026 when he signed an executive order making it clear that he wanted to combat cybercrime and fraud and predatory schemes against American citizens, and he has given us the ability and the resources that we need to fight this particular kind of blight. And if you don't think this affects you, a little primer: seven out of 10 adults globally have encountered a scam one way or another. They are repeatedly trying to rip you off. They are in Southeast Asia, and there are hundreds of, as I said, industrial-scale scam compounds. And the estimates put their earnings at about $40 billion a year.
WATCH LIVE: DOJ Scam Center Strike Force cracks down on 'Chinese-run illicit scam marketplace'https://t.co/cagEx8rhED
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 9, 2026
The Scam Center Strike Force collaborated with the Treasury Department to use a court warrant to seize Telegram channels and two cryptocurrency wallets holding about $12 million that belonged to Xinbi Guarantee. It also restricted 47 more wallets.
Xinbi Guarantee is a Chinese-language online marketplace that cropped up on Telegram in 2022. It functions as an escrow service for people buying and selling services to help those who trade in cryptocurrency.
🔒 Tether Freezes $39.3M in Xinbi-Linked USDT
— Financier.news (@FINANCIERNEWS) September 9, 2026
Tether has frozen roughly $39.3 million in USDT across 10 Tron addresses tied to Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram-based escrow marketplace that TRM Labs says processed about $24.2 billion in transactions since 2022.
USDT$USDT #Tether… pic.twitter.com/ObIrb9XGtH
The platform was a middleman that buyers and sellers use to trade in cryptocurrency. Xinbi holds a payment and only releases it after the deal is concluded. It is meant to prevent criminals from cheating each other.
These marketplaces exist to keep large scam networks running. They connect buyers with sellers to provide money-laundering services, stolen personal data, fake IDs, and tools used to reach victims.
“Xinbi Guarantee has served as a giant, purportedly US-incorporated illicit online marketplace for online scams that primarily offers money laundering services,” Elliptic cofounder Tom Robinson told WIRED.
Pirro noted earlier that “We have charged Chinese bosses who ran a scam compound in Burma where thousands were trafficked, enslaved, beaten and then forced to steal from Americans... They were ordered to pose as U.S. banks, as the New York City Police Department, to steal Americans’ life savings.”
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