The Justice Department on Tuesday said it has seized infrastructure tied to what officials called one of the world’s most prolific criminal marketplaces, used to commit cyber scams and other crimes.

The seized cloud computing account hosted backend infrastructure used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate.

At the same time, the Treasury Department announced fresh sanctions and more against Huione and affiliated companies. The administration actions Tuesday add to disruption efforts from last fall against pieces of the same network.

The Trump administration has placed an emphasis on combating transnational cybercrime and other kinds of scams and fraud.

The seized cloud computing account was used to operate Huione Guarantee, also known as Haowang Guarantee, according to Tuesday’s DOJ announcement.

“The Huione Group used this cloud computing account as part of a technological backbone that allowed billions in fraud proceeds to be transferred, moved, and concealed — much of it stolen through Southeast Asian scam centers,” said Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Seizures of these marketplaces is critical in the fight against fraud that affects so many Americans, and to stop avenues for criminal proceeds to be laundered.”

U.S. officials allege that Huione Guarantee operated Telegram channels with discussions about illicit goods and services, including the sale of stolen credit card and sensitive personal information, malware-enabled thefts, human trafficking schemes and the laundering of money from romance and investment scams. Huione Guarantee also allegedly offered escrow services for criminals such as money launderers for cryptocurrency.

Treasury took two steps Tuesday to build on its move in October to sever Huione Group from the U.S. financial system. One was to tack H-Pay Service onto its rule for Huione Group as a successor entity. And it slapped nine people and 26 entities linked to Prince Group with sanctions.

“Huione Group served as a critical node for laundering proceeds of cyber heists and virtual currency investment scams and was used by the Prince Group to transfer and consolidate scam-derived assets,” Treasury’s announcement states.

Also last October, the Justice Department said it seized bitcoin valued at $15 billion from the chairman of the Prince Group, Chen Zhi, and indicted him over alleged cryptocurrency crimes and other schemes. 

An alleged key figure in Chen’s criminal network has been arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China.

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An Algerian man known online as “SPOX” was extradited from Spain and charged with running a black-market cybercrime operation that prosecutors say defrauded thousands of victims and funneled roughly $900,000 through a cryptocurrency account over a three-year period.

Abdellah Belmili, 26, made his initial appearance Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York in Buffalo. He faces a single count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. 

He was extradited from Spain earlier this month.

Federal investigators say Belmili allegedly created and administered at least two illicit online marketplaces, market0day.com and spoxy.us, that operated similarly to commercial e-commerce platforms. The marketplaces sold financial credentials, phishing kits, compromised email server access, and other tools used to carry out fraud. All transactions on the sites were conducted in Bitcoin.

According to court documents, the FBI became aware of the marketplaces in September 2020 through a confidential source. The site’s administrator was already known to investigators as a prolific creator of phishing kits targeting major U.S. financial institutions.

In 2020, undercover FBI agents used the marketplace to buy a phishing kit designed to replicate JPMorgan Chase’s login page and capture victims’ personal information. Agents also purchased access to a compromised email server. A third item — access to a website control panel — was paid for but never delivered, prompting customer complaints on Belmili’s Telegram channel.

Shortly after those complaints surfaced, Belmili announced he was closing market0day.com and redirecting customers to a new site, spoxy.us, which he described as a “new store for bulk sms,” which typically refers to mass phishing via text message. 

The new site used the same template, color scheme, and navigation structure as its predecessor and was registered using the stolen identity of a 77-year-old Texas resident.

Investigators identified Belmili through a combination of open-source research, search warrants, and records obtained from technology and financial companies. Early versions of his phishing kit code contained his full name, “Dila Belmili,” embedded in the source alongside his Telegram handle and a link to the marketplaces. Facebook accounts linked to the alias “spox_coder” listed “Dila Belmili (spox)” as the display name, and customers had posted complaints about phishing kit purchases directly on his profile.

Records obtained from Google showed that Belmili used his personal email account to search for financial institution logos, hacking tools, and methods for generating fake identities and credit card numbers. The same account received approximately 1,400 emails containing victims’ stolen personal information from active phishing kits targeting American Express, Bank of America, Cash App, JP Morgan Chase, PayPal, and Wells Fargo.

Investigators also found that Belmili had built hidden backdoors into phishing kits he sold to other criminals, allowing him to continue harvesting victim data even after the kits changed hands.

Records from cryptocurrency exchange Binance showed approximately $900,000 deposited into an account registered to Belmili between Jan. 2020 and Jan. 2023. Of that amount, roughly $760,000 was transferred to other accounts or converted into other forms of cryptocurrency, while approximately $41,000 was withdrawn from ATMs. 

In total, investigators identified approximately 595 distinct phishing kits created by Belmili. Analysis of victim data exported to Telegram pages and email accounts linked to the operation identified roughly 5,600 victims in the United States and internationally.

“This defendant thought that he could get away with defrauding thousands of victims out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by using fake names and hiding behind a keyboard to steal bank account and credit card numbers,” said U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo in a release. “This arrest makes clear that, regardless of where you operate, our law enforcement partners will find you – and when they do, you will face the full consequences of your actions.” 

You can read the court documents below. 

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The price of bitcoin dropped 13% down to $64,394 just in June — but there's more bad news, reports CNBC." "Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value since reaching a record high above $123,000 in July 2025." While previous bitcoin selloffs were often followed by large rebounds in price, the latest decline may prompt some investors to revisit why they own bitcoin in the first place, [says Daniel Sotiroff, associate director of ETF and Passive Strategies Research at Morningstar]. Here's what he and other experts have to say about the case for holding crypto, and how much exposure is appropriate for the average investor... Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says. Sotiroff agrees that bitcoin is difficult to value using traditional financial metrics. "The best analogy I've heard is that it's more like a collectible, because it's basically worth what other people are going to pay for it," he says. Sotiroff told CNBC the recent selloff was a reminder that bitcoin's gains can be accompanied by equally dramatic declines — one reason many financial planners recommend limiting exposure to a small portion of a broader portfolio. "You just really can't make a call on what direction it's going to go," says Sotiroff.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An upcoming vote in a few weeks on America's cryptocurrency "Clarity Act" is "rattling Wall Street and consumer advocates," reports CNN, with its proposal to regulate the bulk of crypto markets through America's Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "It allows crypto companies to operate, at long last, in compliance with U.S. rules, rather than what they have been doing — essentially running their businesses within a patchwork of state and federal legal gray areas." Even for Jamie Dimon, the banking titan who's not known to mince words, it was a surprising shot across the bow when he described a fellow financier as "full of sh*t." "No one's gonna bow down to this guy or that company," Dimon told Fox Business last week. "This guy" being Brian Armstrong, and "that company" being cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The Dimon-Armstrong tension isn't new, but it is boiling over publicly as the Senate inches closer to a floor vote on the crypto industry's No. 1 legislative priority, known as the Clarity Act. Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic, broadly supports crypto regulation but takes issue with a provision in the Clarity Act that would allow companies like Coinbase to "effectively pay interest on deposits... without the protection they should have." The spicy comment about Armstrong came after Dimon rattled off other concerns about the Clarity Act, including what he sees as its insufficient anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer safeguards that banks have had in place for decades... "If (Armstrong) takes deposits like a bank, he should have bank rules," Dimon said in the Fox Business interview... The immediate concern from banks (and many consumer advocates) is that crypto exchanges like Coinbase would, in the grand tradition of Silicon Valley innovation, lure customers in with huge rewards and then phase those benefits out over time. Deposits in a crypto exchange are also not insured by the federal government the way bank deposits are, but that's the kind of fine print that customers tend to overlook until it's too late. JPMorgan Chase spokesperson Trish Wexler underscored that the bank wants the bill to pass, with some "fixes," like prohibiting rewards on stablecoin holdings and strengthening anti-money-laundering guardrails. Coinbase's CEO responded in an interview with Politico: Armstrong pointed to restrictions on rewards paid to idle cryptocurrency balances and disclosures on stablecoins as part of a handful of policies included in the bill to appease the banking industry's requests. "I think it'd be good for the banks," Armstrong said of the bill. "It would be great for crypto companies as well ... Hopefully we can get past the absolutisms and just see if we can get this bill over the finish line." But CNN notes concerns about weaving cryptocurrency — "a historically self-contained financial system prone to stomach-churning booms and busts" — more deeply into America's traditional finance infrastructure: "It's not just a crypto story, it's a broad deregulation of our securities markets story," Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who specializes in banking and cryptocurrency, said in an interview. And that should concern everyone, Allen says, even if they have no investments at all, because "if we get a financial crisis in this space... no one comes out of that unscathed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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