U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro unveiled sweeping enforcement actions against an alleged Chinese cybercriminal marketplace that laundered stolen funds through Telegram, part of a crackdown that has now restrained nearly $1 billion.
Pirro's office, working alongside the Secret Service, FBI, and Treasury Department, announced on September 9 in Washington that the federal government had restrained $52 million in cryptocurrency held in digital wallets tied to Xinbi Guarantee, an online platform that Fox Business reported operated as a Chinese-language marketplace for fraud services. A federal court in Washington authorized the seizure of Xinbi's Telegram channels days earlier, and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the platform a transnational criminal organization, a label that bars Americans from doing business with Xinbi and requires any blocked assets to be reported to OFAC.
The announcement came with a specific warning to ordinary Americans: if someone contacts you with a cryptocurrency investment opportunity that sounds too good to be true, hang up and do not send a dime.
Pirro described Xinbi Guarantee not as a simple scam operation but as an entire marketplace, a kind of criminal Amazon where vendors hawked fraud tools and money laundering services to buyers looking to steal from Americans. Vendors listed custom-built fake investment websites designed to mimic real brokerages. Buyers purchased those tools, and Xinbi held funds in escrow until the vendor delivered.
Pirro laid it out at the press conference:
"It's where vendors market their services to scam us. Once the scammer purchases a service from the vendor, Xinbi holds the money for the vendor until the vendor's services are complete."
She went further, calling the escrow system a built-in quality guarantee for criminals.
"It is a double protection to make sure that Americans are scammed properly and unwittingly. Xinbi sells tools of industrial fraud, including custom-built fake investment websites designed to look like real brokerages."
The platform operated primarily on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, giving its users a layer of anonymity. The Treasury Department's designation also accused Xinbi of ties to North Korean hackers and other criminal syndicates, a connection that, if confirmed, would link the fraud network to state-sponsored cybercrime.
Secret Service Special Agent Tara McLeese told reporters about one victim: a Virginia resident who lost $800,000 after being lured into what appeared to be a legitimate cryptocurrency investment. The money was sent to anonymous individuals promoting the fraudulent opportunity, then laundered through the Xinbi network.
"Our team was able to follow the funds as they were laundered through the Xinbi Guarantee Network."
That single case illustrates the scale of the damage these operations inflict on individual Americans, retirees, small investors, and everyday people who trusted what looked like a real brokerage. The $800,000 loss is one case among what federal officials say is a much larger pattern.
Pirro, who has made headlines in her role as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia for a range of high-profile actions including filing felony charges over D.C. monument vandalism, framed the Xinbi takedown as part of a broader effort to catch up to criminal networks that have outpaced law enforcement for years.
"Old crimes are being committed in new ways. They've got this figured out, and it took us a while to understand where it was coming from, who was doing it, how they were doing it. And now that we understand that we will keep pace, and we will beat them."
The enforcement action was not limited to digital seizures. Pirro's Scam Center Strike Force and the FBI recently traveled to Madagascar, where they assisted local authorities in shutting down 13 scam centers allegedly run by Chinese organized crime groups. Those raids resulted in 500 arrests and the repatriation of 30 Chinese leaders of the scam compounds back to China.
Pirro also referenced scam compounds operating in Southeast Asia, where trafficking victims were reportedly recruited to staff fraud operations, a grim detail that connects financial crime to human trafficking networks stretching across multiple continents.
Her tenure as the District of Columbia's top federal prosecutor has not been without controversy. She has faced political scrutiny from both sides, including a congressional probe led by Rep. Jamie Raskin and public criticism from President Trump himself over a separate matter involving dropped vandalism charges at the Reflecting Pool. But the Xinbi action represents the kind of enforcement result that speaks for itself in dollar figures and arrest counts.
Pirro said the federal government has now restrained a total of $938 million linked to cryptocurrency scam schemes. President Trump has been briefed on the operations targeting Americans, she added.
But Pirro was candid about the limits of the victory. When a reporter asked whether Xinbi could simply relocate to another platform after losing its Telegram channels, she acknowledged it would be "very easy" for the group to set up shop elsewhere. The admission was striking in its honesty, and it underscores the challenge of fighting criminal networks that operate in encrypted digital spaces with no fixed infrastructure to seize.
Pirro urged Americans to spread the word to family and friends who might be targeted. Her advice was blunt:
"If you know someone that thinks they've got an opportunity that's too good to be true, or that they've been contacted by someone who's got the in on cryptocurrency... You've got to tell them to stop. Whether it started on a mistaken phone call or WhatsApp or any of the other social media websites. A text, a wrong number. Do not send a dollar. Do not send a penny."
The Telegram channel seizure, the Treasury designation, and the Madagascar raids together represent the most visible federal action yet against the Chinese-language fraud ecosystem that has drained hundreds of millions from American victims. Whether it is enough to deter networks that can rebuild overnight remains an open question, one Pirro herself did not pretend to have answered.
Meanwhile, Pirro continues to navigate a politically charged environment as D.C.'s top federal prosecutor, including ongoing pressure from the White House on unrelated cases. The Xinbi crackdown, however, is the kind of action that puts points on the board for American victims rather than Washington scorekeepers.
Nearly a billion dollars restrained is a good start. But when the criminals can rebuild their storefront in a day, the real test is whether the next billion moves faster than the last.
