a half years, the messaging platform Telegram has served as the home of a sprawling black market known as Xinbi Guarantee, an anarchic, Chinese-language bazaar offering money laundering services to crypto scammers, products like electrified batons and tasers for those same scammers’ human trafficking operations, and even at times other assorted criminal services ranging from harassment-for-hire to teen prostitution. Despite WIRED and crypto crime researchers repeatedly pointing out that blatantly criminal activity to Telegram, the company nonetheless allowed Xinbi Guarantee to grow into the biggest black market on the internet, one that’s facilitated a staggering $21 billion in total transactions.

Source: Wired – Threat Level