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—though it declined to give an exact number for that sales total because it considered its measurements to be a conservative estimate that likely undercounts the true scale of the issue.
“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. Chainalysis says it also identified other independent Telegram channels selling prostitution services.
By identifying trafficking operations from those Telegram posts as well as information from law enforcement and other partner groups, the company’s analysts were able to trace the operations’ transactions, which 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, with vendors willing to offer cash in exchange for dirty crypto.
The scam compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos that exploit forced laborers, most often lured from South Asia and Africa with fraudulent job offers, have been a booming business for years. They now pull in tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually, more than any other form of cybercrime, and human rights groups have estimated that they’ve trapped hundreds of thousands of conscripted scammers. Chainalysis says, however, 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 available by the hour, for more long-term arrangements, and even international services offering to fly sex workers to locations like Macao, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or other “overseas” destinations.
Some advertisements made references to suspected sex trafficking of minors, such as “Lolitas” and “real high schoolers,” Chainalysis found. The company’s analysis of the operations’ crypto transactions also make clear that their payments flow to entities that oversee large numbers of women and girls, not independent sex workers. 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, it found that nearly half of transactions topped $10,000, suggesting “organized criminal enterprises operating at scale,” as the company describes it.
“We’re not talking about a sex trafficker or pimp with three, five, 10 victims,” says McLouth. “We’re talking about hundreds of victims.”
While crypto has likely fueled the growth of the sex trafficking trade, McLouth notes that the ability to track cryptocurrency across blockchains may have also exposed to scrutiny an industry that had long thrived in secret. “This is new visibility into one of the oldest crimes in in existence,” McLouth says.
On the scam compound side of the human trafficking industry, Chainalysis also found Telegram messages offering payments for bringing a new forced laborer into a scam compound, between $8,888 (a number likely chosen due to Chinese cultural associations with the number eight bringing good luck) and $22,000 per individual worker.
“Compound No. 7 is making a strong entry into the market. All agents are welcome to compare prices and inquire,” reads a translation of one Chinese-language Telegram message soliciting Chinese-speaking workers for a compound in Cambodia. “Typing skills are required, good health is required, standard Mandarin is required, no falsified documents, no mental problems is required. … Direct operation from the compound, personnel interviewed at the company, immediate payment.”
As detailed by a whistleblower who contacted WIRED from within a scam compound last year, trafficked workers typically have their passports taken by scam compound bosses and are forced to work 15- or 16-hour shifts targeting Western victims with text-based scam messages. Some are held in debt bondage, while others are more explicitly imprisoned in walled compounds, beaten and electrocuted for violating rules or missing scam quotas.
A Chinese-language post on Telegram offering sex workers, with descriptions of their measurements and sexual services they provide.Courtesy of Chainalysis
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, according to other reports—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. Both companies could do more to avoid enabling human traffickers, West says: Telegram could ban the traffickers’ accounts, or Tether—which unlike Bitcoin functions as a centralized currency—could seize or freeze their assets. Yet she argues that both companies allow these criminal operations to continue to use their tools.
“Why are Telegram and Tether OK with making money from the exploitation of humans? They know this is happening. This money’s being moved on their platform, and the discussions are in open forums,” West says. “There are certain very obvious bad actors that we can point to that, were they to be stopped, would make a substantial dent in the ability to openly discuss these horrific things and pay for them.”
Tether didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. When WIRED reached out to Telegram, the company responded in a statement that “criminal activities—such as human trafficking or money laundering—are expressly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service, and we remove such content immediately upon discovery.” It pointed to page of moderation statistics and 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.)
“These channels, however, are often the only effective means of moving money for people living under strict financial controls in countries such as China, so reports must be examined on a case-by-case basis,” Telegram’s statement continued. “In addition to accepting reports from users and NGOs, Telegram has a large team of moderators empowered by custom AI tools who proactively monitor the platform and remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day.”
Xinbi Guarantee, for its part, appears aware enough of its vulnerability to a more sustained Telegram ban that it’s moved some of its operations to a different messaging service called SafeW, as crypto-tracing firm TRM Labs recently noted, but largely still runs on Telegram.
Chainalysis’s human trafficking research also touches on crypto’s use in the sale of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), which represent a far smaller total of crypto transactions, but one whose effects on its young victims can’t be measured in dollar amounts. Chainalysis found that about half of CSAM transactions are for less than $100, which it argues underscores how cheap and accessible CSAM materials—including AI generated ones—have become. More disturbingly, it points out that CSAM from “hurtcore” and other sadistic online communities that use sextortion tactics to force minors to film explicit videos of themselves is now increasingly resurfacing on commercial marketplaces where it’s sold for cryptocurrency.
Unlike the other sex trafficking and scam compound human trafficking documented in the report, those CSAM transactions are still largely carried out in Bitcoin, Chainalysis found, though CSAM marketplaces now largely use Monero—a “privacy coin” designed to be far more difficult to trace—to launder their proceeds.
The UK-based anti-CSAM nonprofit Internet Watch Foundation, which sometimes partners with Chainalysis in its research, says it’s seen a steady uptick in the use of crypto for CSAM sales since it first began tracking cryptocurrency markets for the materials five years ago. Despite Bitcoin’s traceability, its transnational payments lets operators pay to host CSAM in another country—often the US—making law enforcement operations more complex. “It’s easy, and it’s cross-border,” says one IWF analyst who asked to remain unnamed due to the sensitivity of their work. “You could be on one side of the world but run these services on the other side of the world.”
Chainalysis argues that, as disturbing as crypto’s fueling of the human trafficking trade may be, it also presents opportunities for law enforcement to take on that industry. Some of the vulnerable points to target, says Chainalysis’ McLouth, may include the centralized stablecoin crypto systems these traffickers use, as well the multibillion-dollar guarantee markets running on Telegram and serving as cash-out points for these industries of exploitation.
“These are some of the premier opportunities for disruption from law enforcement,” says McLouth. “But they need to move faster. They need to put more resources into understanding how all this works. Because it’s only going to keep evolving.”