Over 30 darknet markets move to fill the gap left by Huione Guarantee’s shutdown on Telegram

After the illicit online platform Huione Guarantee on Telegram shut down, Tudou Guarantee captured most of its transaction volume. Several similar marketplaces also saw user growth, according to analysts at Elliptic.

The Guarantee ecosystem

A sprawling network of Chinese darknet venues operates on Telegram, providing infrastructure for trading in a range of illegal goods. Most of these are services and tools to launder the proceeds of online fraud, the sale of stolen data and other support for cybercriminals.

Huione Guarantee was the largest player in this ecosystem. As of January 2025, transaction volume on the platform exceeded $24bn, and the number of clients topped 900,000.

Elliptic accused the platform of ties to various offences in South-East Asia, after which it sought to distance itself from the Huione Group conglomerate by rebranding as Haowang Guarantee.

Nevertheless, with Elliptic’s assistance, in May 2025 Telegram removed thousands of channels used by the market and banned related users.

In its final channel posts, Haowang Guarantee announced its closure and urged sellers and buyers to move to Tudou Guarantee.

Initially, the original venue was to keep offering escrow for private transactions, but that too was wound down. Analytics show incoming USDT transactions have fallen to negligible levels.

Huione Pay is the payments arm of the Huione Group conglomerate. It has traditional points of sale across Cambodia, though it also accepts cryptocurrencies. Amid the investigation, the service removed from its website a section dedicated to Huione Guarantee that described it as a subsidiary.

Researchers stress that Huione Pay’s operations are separate from the marketplace, and they use different cryptocurrency wallet infrastructure.

Even so, the payments rail is used to launder proceeds of online fraud, and transaction volumes remain elevated.

Shadowy successors 

The closure of Huione Guarantee created an opening for rivals to fill the gap.

Transaction counts on Tudou Guarantee surged, surpassing 200,000 a day by May 18th and 300,000 by June 15th. The number of users on the illicit platform has nearly doubled. Back in December 2024, Huione Guarantee acquired a 30% stake in Tudou Guarantee, helping the criminal network endure.

Other markets, such as Shuangying and Fully Light, also recorded steady growth: by mid-June, transactions on Shuangying rose from roughly 40,000 to 110,000, and on Fully Light from 20,000 to more than 80,000.

Elliptic is currently tracking more than thirty highly active darknet marketplaces on Telegram, though the total number is far higher.

Earlier, Chainalysis analysts reported that the conglomerate remained active after Haowang Guarantee shut down. Its platforms, they said, continued to process transactions worth billions of dollars, showing resilience to public-infrastructure bans.

In early May, FinCEN, citing Elliptic’s research, called Huione Group “a financial institution of primary money laundering concern” and proposed cutting it off from the U.S. financial system. The agency accused the company of helping North Korea’s Lazarus Group launder cryptocurrency.

The ecosystem of Chinese darknet platforms also plays an important role in the operations of scam factories along the Myanmar–Thailand border.