Behind Southeast Asia’s scam compounds, a third-party escrow system dedicated to facilitating illicit transactions has emerged. Industry insiders also call it the “Alipay” of the criminal and gray-market world. These escrow platforms operate through Telegram groups, providing transaction custody, deposits, and dispute arbitration for scams, money laundering, and other criminal and gray-market transactions. They address the lack of trust between the parties involved, enabling all kinds of black-market deals to settle smoothly.

Huione Guarantee was the earliest leading platform in this sector. Leveraging Cambodia’s scam compounds, it expanded rapidly and facilitated the movement of enormous sums of illicit funds. After Huione was sanctioned by U.S. regulators, platforms such as Xinbi Guarantee, Jinbei, and Daili quickly filled the market gap, continuing to meet demand for transactions involving criminal and gray-market businesses and creating a continuously evolving shadow financial ecosystem.

The profit model of this type of platform includes transaction commissions, monthly fees for public trading groups, advertising, and proprietary business. Its basis of trust is not formal financial regulation, but rather gray rules such as on-chain fund disclosure, community reputation, and internal black-and-white lists. This system itself is extremely unstable; the platform may abscond with the money at any time, which is what people in the圈内 call “black eating black,” and traders have almost no legal channels for redress.

Regulatory crackdowns continue to intensify. In 2025, the U.S. FinCEN designated Huion Group as a major money laundering concern; in September 2026, the U.S. OFAC imposed sanctions on NewCoin Guarantee, and Tether simultaneously froze tens of millions of dollars in involved USDT assets. Regulators are now encircling this type of cross-border illicit funds channel from multiple dimensions, including on-chain assets and operational channels.