Elliptic alleges money laundering and other crimes linked to multi-billion dollar marketplace Huione Guarantee

Blockchain sleuths at analytics firm Elliptic claim to have uncovered what they allege to be money laundering and other purported crimes enabled by Cambodia-based marketplace Huione Guarantee in a new report published Wednesday. 

Since its founding in 2021, crypto wallets associated with Huione and its independent merchants have received at least $11 billion, according to Elliptic, which offered that number as a conservative estimate. 

“Not all of these transactions can be definitively linked to fraud or other illicit activity; however, the nature of the activity on Huione Guarantee suggests that the bulk of these payments relate to this,” the researchers wrote. 

According to Elliptic, Tether’s USDT stablecoin is one of the most popular payment options on the site, which also supports payment apps and bank transfers. 

Huione Guarantee is one facet of the larger Huione Group, which operates a payments app called Huione Pay and has ties to the insurance, airline, and real estate industries across Southeast Asia. Elliptic also alleges that Huione executives have ties to Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Manet.

In the six-page document, Elliptic researchers claim the supposedly “neutral” marketplace has developed into a den of crime. Because merchants run their own instant messaging app channels, Huione argues that it has no visibility into the “specific business of customers” or the nature of money flows on the platform. 

Thus, Elliptic claims, Huione is turning a blind eye to any number of crimes allegedly going on, including merchants who “explicitly offer money laundering services,” “sexploitation” schemes, and malicious software. 

Several screenshots of alleged conversations between merchants and clients show people willing to launder proceeds from “pig butchering” scams, an increasingly common investment fraud scheme involving social engineering to steal funds from victims. 

Other advertisements shown in the report include electric shock collars used to entrap exploited workers trapped in “scam compounds” in countries like Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. The United States Institute of Peace has found that industrial-scale scam compounds that rely on forced labor are “rapidly spreading” across Asia.

Although censorship-resistant blockchain networks help facilitate global crime, Elliptic researchers note that “investigators and compliance teams are able to proactively detect and disrupt USDT payments by using blockchain analytics.”

The firm said it has identified and labeled “hundreds of cryptocurrency addresses” controlled by Huione companies, meaning “exchanges and other businesses receiving cryptoassets can screen these transactions … to ensure that these funds cannot be laundered further.”