Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram.

The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market services as varied as pregnancy surrogacy and teen prostitution.

The crypto romance and investment scams regrettably known as “pig butchering”—carried out largely from compounds in Southeast Asia staffed with thousands of human trafficking victims—have grown to become the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They pull in around $10 billion annually from US victims alone, according to the FBI. By selling money-laundering services and other scam-related offerings to those operations, markets like Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel to an immense scale.

VVS stealer (or VVS $tealer) is a Python-based infostealer targeting Discord users. It employs Pyarmor for obfuscation, contributing to its efficacy.

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Unit 42 shares further updates of cybercrime group Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters. Secure your organization this holiday season.

The post The Golden Scale: 'Tis the Season for Unwanted Gifts appeared first on Unit 42.

The line between research tool and threat creation engine is thin. We examine the capabilities of WormGPT 4 and KawaiiGPT, two malicious LLMs.

The post The Dual-Use Dilemma of AI: Malicious LLMs appeared first on Unit 42.