DOJ takes down 13 alleged Chinese-run scam compounds, seizes $52M in cryp­tocur­rency

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said Wednesday her office has taken down 13 Chinese-run scam compounds and seized $52 million in cryptocurrency related to an online marketplace that uses the messaging app Telegram to defraud Americans and launder money.

The Xinbi Guarantee marketplace, Pirro said, sells tools for industrial fraud, allowing vendors to custom build websites designed to look like real investment firms, solicit trafficking victims to work in scam compounds and launder money that scammers have solicited from wire fraud victims.

“This is not a distant overseas crime story,” Pirro said at a news conference Wednesday where she was joined by officials from the Treasury Department, FBI and Secret Service. “It is an industrial extraction of American savings run by Chinese transnational criminal enterprises and platforms” and conducted with slave labor.

The 13 scam compounds her office took down were in Madagascar and operated by Chinese organized crime syndicates, she said. Scam compounds, which are operated by criminal gangs and use forced labor to commit online financial fraud, are mostly located in Southeast Asia, but there are also hubs in the Middle East, Africa and Central America, with victims being trafficked from at least 60 countries, Pirro said.