The US Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday announced the seizure of a cloud computing account to be used by subsidiaries of Cambodia’s HuiOne Group, as the Treasury Department introduced new sanctions against nine individuals and 26 entities linked to the Prince Group.
“These subsidiaries are alleged to have assisted individuals and organizations in transferring funds for cryptocurrency fraud, cyber scams, and other criminal activities to cryptocurrency blockchains and allowing the transfer of proceeds from these programs to the legitimate banking sector undetected,” the DoJ said.
The seized account, the Justice Department added, hosted the backend infrastructure of subsidiaries, including HuiOne Guarantee (also known as Haowang Guarantee), which operated an illegal Telegram-based marketplace that made billions of dollars in transactions between 2021 and 2025 selling a variety of criminal tools.
This includes personal and financial data, money laundering services, web development services for setting up fake investment platforms and phishing websites, buying individuals through human trafficking schemes, and software to facilitate face swapping, voice splicing, and deepfake impersonation during video calls with victims.
“HuiOne’s guarantor also provided shelter services to criminals who trade on social media to facilitate transactions, including money launderers who steal cryptocurrency,” the DoJ said. “In doing so, the HuiOne Guarantee facilitated the transfer of large sums of money stolen by fraud centers in Southeast Asia.”
A July 2024 analysis from Elliptic revealed that vendors at HuiOne also marketed tear gas, electric batons, and electric chains for use by scammers to arrest and torture their employees. “Marketers refer to ‘preventing escapees’ and controlling ‘runaway dogs,'” the company noted at the time. “Those who work within the scam complex are often referred to as ‘dogs’ or ‘dog pushers.’
“The HuiOne group used this cloud computing account as part of the technological backbone that allowed billions in fraudulent proceeds to be transferred, transported, and hidden — much of it stolen through fraud centers in Southeast Asia,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice.
“Capturing these markets is critical to combating the fraud that affects so many Americans, and stopping the flow of money from crime.”
Although HuiOne announced that it will stop operating in May 2025, a new analysis from Flare revealed that more than 30 markets have already filled the gap left by the confirmation stage, where operators created proprietary messaging platforms to bypass Telegram’s ban.
“The enforcement wave in 2025 was the first concerted effort to reach both the financial and physical layers of the ecosystem at the same level,” said Flare researcher Chris d’Eon. “It produced significant adaptations, including channel restructuring, redistributing flows to all downstream markets, and accelerated work in some areas. However, it did not significantly reduce capacity across the ecosystem through consolidation.”
Correspondingly, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the US Treasury assessed H-Pay Service PLC as a primary money-laundering concern to monitor “HuiOne Group’s efforts to avoid being cut off from the US financial system.” It is worth noting that FinCEN has designated HuiOne Group as a “primary money laundering concern” in May 2025.
“Sellers sold money laundering services, stolen personal information, websites and other goods and services needed to carry out so-called ‘pig slaughter’ scams and other online fraud,” Elliptic said in a statement. “By the time HuiOne was forced offline, it had generated more than $31 billion in cryptoasset transactions, making it the largest online cryptocurrency market ever recorded, more than 25 times larger than Silk Road and AlphaBay combined.”
This also happened as the Ministry of Finance issued sanctions against the leadership of the Prince Group, investors in the scam conferences, and front companies, a little over eight months after it was described as a Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO) for its role in furthering a criminal business built on the foundations of fraud, fraud, and money laundering. The chairman of Prince Group, Chen Zhi has been arrested, deported to China, and stripped of his Cambodian citizenship.
“Transnational criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia, such as the Prince Group TCO and supported by their proxies such as the HuiOne Group, continue to target Americans for large-scale cyber fraud and scams,” Treasury said.
