Cloudy With a Chance of Justice: Feds Seize the Engine Room of Huione's Crypto Laundromat 🧺

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday announced the seizure of a cloud computing account that hosted "backend infrastructure" for subsidiaries of Cambodia-based conglomerate Huione Group, accusing the network of helping to launder billions of dollars in proceeds from crypto investment fraud and cyber scams. "Today's seizure strikes a blow against one of the world's most prolific criminal marketplaces," Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the department's Criminal Division said in a statement. The account, he added, served as "a technological backbone that allowed billions in fraud proceeds to be transferred, moved, and concealed," much of it stolen through Southeast Asian scam centers.

According to court documents, the seized account helped operate Huione Guarantee, also known as Haowang Guarantee, a Telegram-based marketplace where vendors traded stolen card and identity data, malware proceeds, and laundering services for romance and investment scams, along with escrow services that allowed money launderers to transact in crypto. Blockchain analysts have described Huione Guarantee as the largest illicit online marketplace ever documented, eclipsing dark-web predecessors such as Silk Road. Telegram banned its channels in May 2025, forcing the platform to shut down, though successor markets quickly emerged to fill the gap.

The seizure caps a year of escalating enforcement against Huione. In October, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued a final rule severing Huione from the U.S. financial system as a "primary money laundering concern," citing its role in laundering crypto-fraud proceeds and funds from North Korean cyber heists. On Tuesday, FinCEN moved to extend that designation to a successor entity, H-Pay Service PLC, to prevent the group from evading the ban.

The scale of the underlying fraud remains substantial. Americans reported more than $7.2 billion in losses from crypto investment fraud alone to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2025, part of over $20 billion in total cybercrime losses last year — a 26% increase. The case, investigated by the FBI's San Francisco field office and IRS Criminal Investigation, falls under Operation Riptide, an FBI campaign targeting the infrastructure behind online fraud. The department credited blockchain analytics firms Chainalysis and Elliptic, along with Google's cybercrime team, with assisting in the investigation.