U.S. Treasury Axes Cambodia’s Huione Group in Crypto Crackdown—Another ’Offshore Oops’ for Digital Asset Hygiene
FinCEN just dropped the regulatory hammer on Huione Group, cutting off its U.S. financial access over alleged crypto money laundering pipelines. The Cambodia-based firm now joins the growing graveyard of offshore entities that treated compliance like an optional NFT feature.
Behind the scenes: This isn’t your grandma’s hawala network—Huione’s alleged operations reportedly funneled millions through privacy coins and mixers. Treasury officials are calling it a ’case study in Web3’s dark liquidity problem.’
The kicker? While Wall Street still debates crypto ETFs, regulators keep finding actual financial crime happening in real time. Maybe next they’ll investigate why traditional banks keep missing these flows until after the 100x leverage has been cashed out.
Huione Promoted Fraudulent Investments, ‘Pig Butchering’ Schemes
Federal authorities noted that the online marketplace facilitated bad actors to defraud people through social media texts. Further, Huione helped in running “pig butchering” investment scams, the announcement read.
The Group has become a “marketplace of choice” for malicious cyber actors, said Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury.
“Today’s proposed action will sever Huione Group’s access to correspondent banking, degrading these groups’ ability to launder their ill-gotten gains,” he added. Treasury remains committed to disrupting any attempt by malicious cyber actors to secure revenue from or for their criminal schemes.”
Over $4 Billion Accumulated From Romance, Investment Fraud
Per the FinCEN report, the online marketplace has been selling items useful for carrying out cyber scams, to payment services in fiat currency. They frequently used for money laundering and even recently developed stablecoin, it added.
“FinCEN’s investigation identified that, in aggregate, Huione Group laundered at least $4 billion worth of illicit proceeds between August 2021 and January 2025.”
From the $4 billion accumulated, at least $37 million worth of convertible crypto stemmed from the North Korean cyber heists. Besides, $36 million came from crypto investment scams, and $300 million worth of digital assets from other cyber scams.
Per a research from Elliptic last year, the platform had already facilitated transactions exceeding $11 billion through online scams in Southeast Asia. Using blockchain analytics, the Elliptic research team was able to quantify the cryptocurrency transactions on the Huione marketplace.
