$24 Billion Underground River: The Collapse of Huiwang Guarantee

Original Author: Xiao Bing, Deep Tide TechFlow

April 1, 2026, Phnom Penh International Airport.

A man in handcuffs was hooded by Chinese special police and pushed onto a China Southern Airlines passenger jet. A few hours later, the plane landed somewhere in China. The special police removed the hood, revealing a pale and exhausted face.

His name was Li Xiong, Chairman of the Huione Group, and the most important right-hand man of Chen Zhi, founder of the Prince Group. During his years overseeing Huione, this name was known to everyone in the Chinese community in Phnom Penh. Red QR codes for Huione Pay were plastered on small shops, restaurant owners used it to collect payments, and casinos used it for settlements. Huione Pay called itself "Cambodia's Alipay," sounding harmless.

But this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Beneath the surface lay a $24 billion underground financial empire. A criminal service supermarket woven from thousands of Telegram groups. An illegal marketplace five times larger than the dark web king Hydra and three times larger than FTX at its peak.

Its name was Huione Guarantee.

Li Xiong's capture came exactly 84 days after Chen Zhi, founder of the Prince Group, was escorted back to China. The successive apprehension of these two men marked the official beginning of the end for the largest money-laundering empire in cryptocurrency history.

A Dark Rise from a Fujian Teenager

To understand Huione Guarantee, one must first understand the man behind it.

Chen Zhi, born in 1987 in Xia'ao Town, Lianjiang County, Fujian Province. This coastal town faces the Matsu Islands across the water to the east. The Chen family was ordinary, with an economic status below average locally. Chen Zhi dropped out after finishing the second year of middle school. At fifteen or sixteen, his "classroom" moved from school to internet cafes.

Around 2005, internet cafes proliferated wildly along the Fujian coast, where a group of teenagers received their initial education in China's internet black market. Chen Zhi was one of them. He gathered a few classmates to form a small team, making a living by setting up private servers for the game "Legend of Mir," cracking official servers, and reselling user information. These businesses operated in legal gray areas at the time but were highly profitable. Game private servers became his first pot of gold.

His fellow townsmen later recalled that Chen Zhi also dabbled in data trading, ran dating websites, and gaming social sites. In short, he did anything that could make money on the internet, legal or not.

Around 2010, Chen Zhi left Lianjiang with approximately 500,000 yuan in illicit gains.

Destination: Cambodia.

Building a Dream in Phnom Penh

In 2011, Phnom Penh was still a city in its chaotic early stages. Chinese capital had just begun flooding into Southeast Asia, and Cambodia's real estate market was a blue ocean. Chen Zhi seized this window.

He didn't compete with major developers for prime land. Instead, he bought cheap land in Phnom Penh's suburbs, building small houses and shops. This low-cost, fast-turnaround strategy perfectly suited a speculator with limited funds but sharp instincts.

In 2014, Chen Zhi spent $250,000 to obtain Cambodian investment immigration, gaining local citizenship. From then on, the identity of the "Fujian internet cafe teenager" was completely erased, replaced by "Cambodian-Chinese entrepreneur Vincent Chen Zhi."

In 2015, the Prince Holding Group was officially established.

The speed that followed was dizzying. The Prince Group's signboard rose in downtown Phnom Penh, its business rapidly expanding from real estate to banking, insurance, telecommunications, retail, and tourism. Its Prince Square shopping mall became a Phnom Penh landmark, and Prince Bank obtained its formal license in 2018. Chen Zhi even established the Prince Foundation, flaunting philanthropy with total donations exceeding $16 million, perfectly crafting an image of a "respected entrepreneur and philanthropist."

Political connections were the most crucial lubricant for this machine. Chen Zhi once spent $20 million to host a 68th birthday banquet for then-Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, inviting diplomats from various countries to lend prestige. He was successively appointed by royal decree as an advisor to Interior Minister Sar Kheng, National Assembly President Heng Samrin, Prime Minister Hun Sen, and successor Prime Minister Hun Manet. In 2020, he was granted the title of "Duke" and received a diplomatic passport.

On the streets of Phnom Penh, over one-third of the Rolls-Royces belonged to the Prince Group. Chen Zhi himself traveled with bodyguards, his vehicle a Rolls-Royce. Someone who met him described him this way: short, about 1.68 meters tall, large forehead, strong Fujian accent, with eyes that conveyed "a kind of ruthlessness."

Beneath all this glossy surface, the Prince Group's real profit engine was a different kind of business.

The Scam Factory

Starting in 2015, Chen Zhi built at least 10 enclosed compounds across Cambodia.

These compounds were surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, inaccessible to outsiders. Thousands of cross-border workers from China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, and other countries were lured by recruitment ads promising high-paying IT jobs. Once they stepped through the compound gates, their passports were confiscated, their phones monitored, and they were reduced to "tools" for telecom fraud.

U.S. Department of Justice indictments revealed the operational details of these compounds: The Prince Group's fraud syndicate controlled millions of phone numbers, establishing "phone farm"-style call centers across multiple compounds. Two facilities alone were equipped with 1,250 phones, controlling about 76,000 social media accounts. Internal Prince Group documents even taught employees how to build fake intimate relationships with victims, advising them to "avoid using overly beautiful female profile pictures" to increase credibility.

This was the so-called "pig butchering" scam. First, establish trust and emotional connection with victims using fake identities—"fattening the pig." Then, induce victims to invest real money into fake investment platforms—"butchering the pig."

Chen Zhi personally participated in managing these scam bases. In his ledgers, profit records were explicitly labeled "pig butchering," detailing the responsible floor and building for each project. For workers who resisted, his instruction was four words: "You can beat them, but don't kill them."

In the compounds' Telegram groups, crypto analytics firm Elliptic even found sales ads for electric shock ankle restraints used to confine workers.

Money from scams flowed continuously from victims' bank accounts into the Prince Group's underground vaults. But this money was "dirty" and couldn't directly enter the formal financial system.

It needed a river to "wash" it.

That river was Huione.

The Dark Web Taobao

In 2021, Huione Guarantee quietly launched on Telegram.

Its initial positioning seemed normal: an escrow platform for real estate and used car transactions. Buyers paid the Huione Guarantee bot, sellers delivered the goods, buyers confirmed receipt, and Huione released the funds to the seller, taking a commission. Essentially, it was Taobao's "confirm receipt" model.

But soon, the "goods" traded on this platform took a different turn.

Money laundering services became the core category. In Huione Guarantee's Telegram groups, merchants openly advertised: accepting dirty money, providing clean funds. The jargon called those holding illicit funds or bank information "material owners," called the low-level workers in scam compounds "dog pushers," and called the money laundering middleman's work "moving bricks."

A typical money laundering process looked like this: A fraud syndicate scams money through "pig butchering," hands it to a middleman on Huione Guarantee. The middleman, through a network of "money mules" and shell accounts spread across over a dozen countries, layers the funds through multiple transfers, ultimately returning them to the fraud syndicate in the form of USDT stablecoins. The middleman and money mules each take a commission.

The entire process operated like a precisely engineered industrial assembly line.

Huione Guarantee didn't just sell money laundering services. Its merchants also offered: scam scripts, fake website development, AI face-swapping technology, databases of personal information for trafficked individuals, identity documents of citizens from various countries, Starlink satellite equipment (for compound communications)—almost any criminal tool you could imagine could be bought here.

Huione Guarantee was a clearly priced criminal supermarket, and Telegram groups were its shelves.

By mid-2024, when Elliptic first exposed this platform, its transaction volume had already exceeded $11 billion. By early 2025, that number more than doubled to $24 billion. There were 9,289 active public Huione Guarantee groups on Telegram, with over 900,000 registered users.

For comparison: Hydra, the largest dark web market in history, operated for six full years with a total transaction volume of just $5 billion. Huione Guarantee achieved five times that in less than four years.

Internal documents from Huione International Pay from 2022-2023 obtained by Bloomberg recorded thousands of victims and tens of millions of dollars in transactions. The documents showed Huione employees directly participated in monitoring transactions and handling disputes, the platform regularly took commissions from trades, and even "provided large credit lines to high-performing money laundering teams."

In Phnom Penh, Huione International Pay's office was located on the second floor of the Huione Pay headquarters building. This glass and concrete structure had two panda statues at its entrance. Employees upstairs worked under pseudonyms, with one department liaising with fraudsters, another monitoring Telegram channels, and another tracking money mule accounts spread across over a dozen countries.

When USDT Isn't Safe Enough

What was truly shocking about the Huione empire wasn't its scale, but its speed of evolution.

In July 2024, Tether froze 29.62 million USDT in a Huione Pay wallet. The reason: the wallet had received stolen funds linked to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group. On-chain detective ZachXBT further discovered that the $35 million stolen from Japan's DMM exchange also ultimately flowed into Huione Pay addresses.

The freezing of USDT was an existential threat to Huione.

Because while USDT runs on a blockchain, it is essentially centralized. Tether can, at any time, cooperate with law enforcement to freeze USDT in any address with a single click. For a money-laundering empire whose lifeblood was USDT, this meant its throat was in someone else's grip.

Huione's response stunned the entire industry.

In September 2024, the Huione Group launched its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDH. Its official slogan was brazenly blunt: "Avoid common freezes and transfer restrictions of traditional digital currencies," "Not subject to restrictions from traditional regulators." In plain language: we created a USDT that can't be frozen.

USDH was just the beginning. Huione紧接着 launched its own blockchain, Huione Chain (also known as Xone Chain), its own cryptocurrency exchange, Huione Crypto, and its own communication software, ChatMe—a complete, self-sufficient digital dark kingdom.

It even attempted to raise funds through an ICO, issuing the blockchain native token "HC."

The logic behind these moves was terrifyingly clear: If Tether holds USDT's throat, then create your own stablecoin that no one can freeze; if Telegram can ban groups, then make your own communication software; if existing blockchains can be traced, then build your own chain.

The Crackdown

But they were wrong.

In July 2024, Elliptic released its first investigative report on Huione Guarantee, dropping a bomb into the view of global regulators.

Huione Guarantee quickly rebranded as "Haowang Guarantee," attempting to distance itself from the Huione Group. Huione Pay's official website also deleted pages describing Huione Guarantee as a "subsidiary." But Haowang Guarantee itself admitted on social media that the Huione Group remained its "strategic partner and shareholder."

On May 1, 2025, the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) formally designated the Huione Group as a "Primary Money Laundering Concern," announcing plans to completely exclude it from the U.S. financial system. FinCEN's report specifically named three Huione Group entities—Huione Pay, Huione Crypto, and Haowang Guarantee—stating they were "substantially one and the same" as the parent company.

That same month, Telegram acted.

On May 13, Telegram, citing "violations of Terms of Service," banned over 3,000 Huione-related accounts and channels in one sweep. Within 48 hours, Haowang Guarantee issued a suspension announcement, stating "all NFTs and groups have been banned," and declared a halt to all operations.

The empire seemed to have collapsed. But Huione displayed astonishing resilience.

In the weeks following the suspension, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis found that cryptocurrency transaction volumes associated with Huione entities did not decrease but instead increased. Haowang Guarantee directed users to a new platform called "Tudou Guarantee" (Potato Guarantee), claiming to have acquired a 30% stake. Haowang also invested in Tudou Guarantee, achieving a business rebirth through a shell change. It even developed the independent communication software ChatMe, attempting to completely break free from reliance on Telegram.

But a bigger blow was yet to come.

On October 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice and Treasury jointly announced: criminal charges against Prince Group founder Chen Zhi, issuing a global arrest warrant, and seizing 127,271 Bitcoin under his name, valued at approximately $15 billion at the time. This set a record for the largest single seizure of crypto assets in U.S. judicial history. Simultaneously, the U.S. Treasury placed 146 individuals and entities linked to the Prince Group on its sanctions list. The UK froze Chen Zhi's 19 properties in London and all his UK assets on the same day.

Cambodia's total GDP in 2024 was about $46 billion. The Bitcoin seized by the U.S. from the Prince Group in one action was equivalent to one-third of the country's GDP.

Collapse

The chain reaction from the sanctions was faster than anyone anticipated.

Late on December 1, 2025, Huione Pay suddenly announced: due to "millions of users initiating a concentrated run," the platform activated its "Deferred Redemption Plan," all offline stores nationwide suspended operations, and user funds would be locked for up to January 5, 2026.

Long lines instantly formed on the streets of Phnom Penh.

Audit data from Bitrace showed that after processing its last withdrawal on December 1, Huione Pay had only about 990,000 USDT left on-chain. Its Ethereum business had already exhausted its balance back in October. Its Tron business had consolidated hot wallet funds multiple times in November to meet withdrawals but was ultimately completely drained around November 28. The daily USDT outflow plummeted from 41.83 million at the beginning of the month to 7.17 million.

Huione Pay, which called itself "Cambodia's Alipay," became an empty shell overnight.