July 10, 2024 By Bill Toulas
The seemingly legitimate online marketplace Huione Guarantee is being used as a platform for laundering money from online scams, especially "pig butchering" investment fraud, researchers say.
In a pig butchering scam, the victim is tricked into gradually investing money on bogus websites that display high investment returns. The fraud becomes apparent when victims try to withdraw funds, by which time they have usually lost a large amount of money.
According to a report from Elliptic blockchain analytics firm, the merchants on Huine Guarantee have made transactions of at least $11 billion of transactions, some of them linked to various types of cybercrime, including creating websites for investment fraud, personal data sales, and money laundering.
