The US Treasury Department has sanctioned Huione Group, a Cambodian-based crypto operation, for enabling money laundering and scamming activities. The Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced the sanction, arguing that Huione allowed North Korean hackers to secure their funds and further facilitated romance scams, called ‘pig butchering ‘, often involving extorting cryptocurrency from victims. FinCEN has had enough of the scams and has decided to cut Huione off from the American financial system. Huione, meanwhile, has released its very own stablecoin so that scammers can make transactions without government interference. FinCEN announced they were targeting Huione Group, primarily as a money laundering group, and would restrict the crypto group’s access to the American market. FinCEN further mentioned particular scams such as ‘pig butchering’, which involves extorting people for crypto through romance scams, and North Korean hackers laundering money using Huione networks. FinCEN estimates Huione laundered around $4 billion between August 2021 and January 2025. Convertible Virtual Currency (CVC) scams, such as romance scams, have also resulted in much personal suffering. FinCEN, therefore, is banning American companies from interacting with Huione Group. They have given 30 days for the public to comment on the ban. At 53 years old, Beth Hyland was scammed out of $26,000 of Bitcoin through a romance scam on Tinder. The Nigerian-based scammer told her that he was a freelance manager temporarily locked out of his bank account and needed Hyland to give him some money. However, Hyland started to suspect that something was wrong when he kept asking for money. Hyland said she ignored all of the telltale signs because she was in love and gave him the benefit of the doubt. Hyland says she will write a book about her experiences and publish all of the love messages by the scammer so that other people can learn how clever the scammers are with their ‘love bombing’ tactics. FinCEN would classify such a case as a CVC because the scammer was converting a romance scam into cryptocurrency. Huione, meanwhile, has released its stablecoin, USDH, because they were frustrated by governments freezing its assets and blocking its transactions. Huione promoted their new stablecoin by announcing that USDH was not regulated like other stablecoins on the market. The Huione network needs its infrastructure because other network could easily blacklist their wallet addresses. Huione was using USDT Tether before it ran into problems with the network. Tether froze Huione’s accounts in June 2024 after they realised that Huione had funds linked to the North Korean hacking group Lazarus Group. Huione Group also had to develop its chat service because Telegram also censored them. Just last week, the United Nations published a report about scammers and illegal exchanges, mentioning the operations of Huione Group. The UN noted that the group has enabled scammers and processed billions of transactions since 2021. Huione Group, meanwhile, has changed its name to Haowang, possibly to dissociate itself from the bad reputation that Huione Group has amassed.
