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Homepage > News > Finance > Crypto’s role in pig butchering scams laid bare in new ICIJ report A major investigative report is shining a seriously unfavorable light on the role that digital assets play in helping ‘pig butchering’ scammers launder their ill-gotten gains. On November 17, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a deep-dive called ‘The Coin Laundry,’ an examination of “how the crypto boom minted a shadow economy that thrives on crime—and left a trail of devastated victims.” The investigation was conducted over a 10-month span by more than 100 journalists from 37 news organizations in 35 countries. These journalists analyzed “tens of thousands of cryptocurrency transactions to expose the global financial flows behind money laundering networks, cyber heists and other criminal enterprises.” The investigation is broken down into several parts, but we’ll focus mainly on the one involving Huione Guarantee, the Cambodia-based, Chinese-language digital marketplace that was flagged last year as a hub for criminal organizations engaged in pig butchering scams. (Huione rebranded as Haowang Guarantee following its unwelcome media spotlight.) Huione/Haowang Guarantee has been linked to the larger Huione Group, a conglomerate that includes legitimate operations, such as the Huione Pay payments platform. Huione Group has denied these ties, although an offshoot of Huione Pay (Huione International Payments) has also helped facilitate the laundering of funds stolen from pig butchering victims. In May, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) flagged Huione Group as “a financial institution of primary money laundering concern” and proposed severing Huione Group’s access to the U.S. financial system. FinCEN followed through on this proposal last month, citing Huione’s role as “a critical node for laundering proceeds of cyber heists carried out by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and for transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Asia perpetrating…

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Filed under: News - @ November 18, 2025 12:24 pm