Crypto-Funded Human Trafficking Is Exploding
Crypto-Funded Human Trafficking Is Exploding 🚨
Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view.
In new research published today, crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis found that crypto-funded transactions for human trafficking—largely forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia and coerced into working as online scammers, as well as sex-trafficking prostitution rings—grew explosively in 2025. According to the firm’s analysis, based largely on tracing across blockchains the cryptocurrency those criminal operations use, researchers found that crypto transactions for human trafficking grew at least 85 percent year over year. The total amount of those transactions, Chainalysis says, is now at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. “This is the continuation of a story of industrialized exploitation,” says Chainalysis analyst Tom McLouth. “The emergence of borderless, low-fee payments has created the opportunity for human trafficking to scale faster.”
The human trafficking operations Chainalysis identified in its research were primarily Chinese-speaking criminal groups posting advertisements for their offerings to the messaging service Telegram. Many of the posts were found on “guarantee” black markets that run on Telegram channels, such as Xinbi Guarantee and the recently defunct Tudou Guarantee, which offer escrow services that accept and hold cryptocurrencies to prevent users from being defrauded. The operations’ transactions are almost entirely carried out with “stablecoins,” cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the US dollar to avoid volatility, such as Tether and USDC. Much of the profits from the human trafficking operations also flowed back into the same Telegram-based guarantee markets, which serve as vast, multibillion-dollar money laundering hubs. Chainalysis also found Telegram messages offering payments for bringing a new forced laborer into a scam compound, between $8,888 and $22,000 per individual worker.
While scam compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos pull in tens of billions of dollars annually, Chainalysis says that the majority of the measurable growth it traced in crypto-funded human trafficking actually came from sex trafficking operations. It found detailed Chinese-language Telegram advertisements describing profiles of sex workers, with some advertisements making references to suspected sex trafficking of minors, such as “Lolitas” and “real high schoolers.” Chainalysis found that 62 percent of transactions for the typical prostitution networks it examined were between $1,000 and $10,000, while for the international sex trafficking operations in particular, nearly half of transactions topped $10,000, suggesting “organized criminal enterprises operating at scale.” “We’re not talking about a sex trafficker or pimp with three, five, 10 victims,” says McLouth. “We’re talking about hundreds of victims.”
The common threads across both the sexual exploitation and scam compound sides of the crypto-funded human trafficking industry are the use of Telegram as a market platform and stablecoins—particularly the popular stablecoin Tether—as their means of payment, points out Erin West, a former Santa Clara County, California, prosecutor who leads an anti-scam organization called Operation Shamrock. West states, “Why are Telegram and Tether OK with making money from the exploitation of humans? They know this is happening.” Tether responded that it “condemns human trafficking, forced labor, and sexual exploitation in the strongest possible terms” and has cooperated with 330 law enforcement agencies around the world in more than 2,000 cases, and said it had frozen about $4 billion worth of Tether. The company emphasized that “public blockchains provide law enforcement with a level of transparency and traceability that is fundamentally unavailable in cash-based trafficking networks.” Telegram stated that criminal activities are “expressly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service, and we remove such content immediately upon discovery,” noting its ban last May of the Telegram channels for Xinbi Guarantee as well as an even bigger black market, Huione Guarantee. In fact, both markets bounced back in the months that followed, with Xinbi simply rebuilding its Telegram channels and Huione rebranding as Tudou Guarantee.