Federal authorities have seized over $52 million in cryptocurrency and dismantled 13 Chinese-run scam compounds in Madagascar in a coordinated strike against an industrial-scale fraud network targeting Americans. The operation, executed by the Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force and U.S. Treasury officials, directly targets Xinbi Guarantee—a Telegram-based marketplace that has processed at least $24 billion in transactions since 2022.
Xinbi functions as a critical infrastructure for criminal enterprises, facilitating money laundering, stolen personal information trafficking, fraudulent website technology, and victim recruitment. According to government sources, vendors through the platform supply services that enable fraud rings to operate across borders: identity theft groups, fake investment sites, guarded compounds housing trafficked workers, and cryptocurrency wallets used to move illicit funds.
The Treasury Department designated Xinbi as a transnational criminal organization, severing its access to U.S. financial systems. In a single day, authorities restrained approximately $12 million in two cryptocurrency wallets plus assets linked to 47 additional addresses—part of a broader effort that has now frozen nearly $938 million in cryptocurrency since the operation began.
U.S. personnel also worked with Malagasy authorities to dismantle 13 Chinese-run compounds, processing roughly 3,200 electronic devices and arresting nearly 400 individuals, including about 30 alleged Chinese ringleaders repatriated to China. Xinbi’s chief executive officer, founder, and related Telegram groups are among the sanctioned targets, with all assets under U.S. jurisdiction blocked from further use.
The operation reveals that modern fraud networks operate as organized enterprises—not isolated hackers—employing complex supply chains where victims are exploited in compounds while criminals launder funds through cryptocurrency layers across multiple jurisdictions. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported $8.65 billion in cryptocurrency-related fraud losses for Americans alone in 2025, an 89 percent increase from 2023 figures.
By targeting the financial infrastructure and physical compounds that fuel these scams, U.S. authorities are shifting from treating such operations as isolated incidents to confronting them as systematic transnational crime. The scale of this effort underscores a critical distinction: freezing assets disrupts thousands of crimes simultaneously, while individual arrests address only one node in an expansive network.