Tether Freeze on Xinbi Guarantee Also Hit Its Newer Payment Service, Data Shows

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• Tether froze about $39.3 million in USDT across 10 Tron addresses tied to Xinbi Guarantee on September 8, according to blockchain monitor MistTrack. A separate forensics firm, Bitrace, counted a larger total: roughly $45 million across 21 addresses.
• Two of the addresses in Bitrace’s count belong to something the firm labeled “Xpay,” which appears to be Xinbi’s newer payment service rather than its original escrow wallets.
• Tether froze a Huione Guarantee wallet the same way in July 2024. Huione’s Telegram channels were pulled in May 2025 and its volume collapsed; Xinbi’s channels were pulled the same day and its volume rose instead.

Xinbi Guarantee is a Chinese-language marketplace that runs largely through Telegram and has become one of the largest cash-out points for pig-butchering scams and stolen crypto in Southeast Asia. MistTrack, the monitor that first flagged this freeze, said it followed the same playbook Tether used against Xinbi’s collapsed predecessor, Huione Guarantee.

“Following its freeze of Huione-linked funds, this appears to mark another crackdown on illicit Telegram-based escrow platforms.” — MistTrack

The frozen list may reach beyond Xinbi’s escrow wallets

MistTrack’s figure covers 10 addresses holding 39,273,713 USDT combined, with balances ranging from a few dollars up to 10.78 million. Bitrace, another blockchain-forensics firm, put the total higher: about $45 million spread across 21 addresses. Nineteen of those, per Bitrace’s count, sit under Xinbi Guarantee’s own name. The other two are labeled “Xpay.”

Xinbi does not appear to run a public product by that exact name, but the timing lines up with XinbiPay, a wallet service TRM Labs said Xinbi launched during 2025 to diversify beyond Telegram-based escrow as regulators closed in. If Xpay and XinbiPay turn out to be the same thing, this freeze is the first public sign that investigators are now tracing money through Xinbi’s newer payment rail, not just the guarantee-marketplace wallets that have drawn scrutiny since 2022.

A pattern that hasn’t slowed Xinbi down yet

Tether has moved against this cluster of platforms before. In July 2024, it froze 29.62 million USDT in a single wallet linked to Huione Guarantee, Xinbi’s larger, Cambodia-based predecessor in the guarantee-marketplace business. Ten months later, Telegram pulled both Huione’s and Xinbi’s channels from its platform on the same day, May 13, 2025.

The two marketplaces did not fare the same afterward. Huione’s volume never recovered, settling at roughly $30 million a month, about half its 2024 peak, according to TRM Labs. Xinbi came back on Telegram under the same account and saw its daily inflows jump nearly 90%. By TRM’s count, Xinbi had processed about $17.9 billion in total volume as of this February, including $8.9 billion in the second half of 2025 alone, after both platforms were supposedly cut off. Measured against that, even Bitrace’s higher $45 million figure comes to roughly a quarter of one percent of what Xinbi has moved since it launched.

Who actually made this call is still unclear

Neither Tether nor Xinbi has said what triggered the September 8 freeze. MistTrack and Bitrace both flagged the addresses through their own blockchain monitoring, not through any disclosed law enforcement directive. That gap is drawing more attention than usual right now. On August 31, two Thai businessmen sued Tether in a New York federal court, alleging it blacklisted their USDT in October 2025 on nothing more than a verbal request from a Homeland Security Investigations agent, months before any warrant existed.

“A baseless attempt to interfere with Tether’s important work with global law enforcement.” — Tether, responding to the lawsuit

Tether said it cooperates with more than 340 law enforcement agencies in 65 countries. The lawsuit does not involve Xinbi. But it is a reminder that the public usually learns why Tether froze a wallet only after the fact, from outside monitoring firms, not from Tether itself.

Removing tens of millions of dollars a scam network was relying on to cash out still costs it money and forces merchants to open new wallets. But the last two attempts to squeeze this part of the guarantee-marketplace economy, freezing a Huione wallet and banning both platforms from Telegram, did not stop Xinbi from growing into the larger of the two survivors. Whether going after its payment infrastructure directly turns out differently is something only the next few months of on-chain data will show.