On January 10, 2025, a netizen exposed a screenshot of a chat record of a group on the Telegram software on a social platform. The content of the communication in the picture was a blockchain guarantee transaction for the sale of Wang Xing. The publisher claimed that the chat record occurred before the Wang Xing incident, which aroused heated discussion among netizens.

Some researchers believe that the chat record is forged and the transaction does not exist at all, but Bitrace found through blockchain fund analysis that the on-chain transaction corresponding to the chat record does exist and is not completely forged.

Chat Record Analysis

Bitrace has been investigating currency-related crimes in Southeast Asia for a long time and is familiar with the local crypto crime industry. Based on the business logic of guarantee transactions, we have reorganized all the information that appears in the chat records:

Chat Location

After the customer service of the guarantee platform matches the buyer and seller in the advertising area or the public trading group, a special trading group will be established for the three parties to communicate. The place in the chat screenshot is the special trading group.

Screenshotter

There are six people in the special group, five of whom spoke, all of whom are buyers and sellers. This indicates that if the screenshot is true, the person who took the screenshot is the creator of the group chat, that is, the customer service of the guarantee platform.

Timeline

At 02:31 on the same day, the buyer and seller began to communicate about the deposit

At 02:32 on the same day, the seller claimed that "the person has boarded the car"

At 02:41 on the same day, both parties began to evaluate the transaction target "Wang Xing", but the photo of the victim in the screenshot was published at 19:46 the previous day

At 03:08 on the same day, both parties acknowledged that the deposit had been received

At 03:10 on the same day, the group name was modified to mark the transaction successful

At 03:12 on the same day, the chat record ended

Blockchain Analysis

According to the BitracePro blockchain fund analysis canvas, we did not find any transfer records of 14,000 USDT on January 3, the day when Wang Xing was reported missing as officially reported.

However, after traversing TAiv3g's transaction records, we successfully found a transaction amount of 13928 USDT, which occurred at 03:08 on November 19, 2024, which coincides with the time when the deposit arrived in the aforementioned timeline.

After expanding TAiv3g's transactions around this time point, we found the buyer's address TFAbPj that was suspected of obtaining the deposit funds. The latter is a user address of a known cryptocurrency payment platform, and the funds therefore flowed into the business address of the payment company.

This type of activity has occurred more than once on the guarantee platform. The canvas shows that at least 10 user addresses of the payment tool are also participants in the guarantee transaction, with the amount ranging from 7,000 to 80,000 USDT, and the content of the transaction is unknown.

True or false

There are many contradictions in the chat record screenshots, indicating that the transactions presented in this set of chat records are actually unrelated to Wang Xing:

1/ Wang Xing lost contact on January 3, but there was no 14,000 USDT transfer to the address on that day;

2/ The release time of the photo in the chat record is wrong, and it should be a forged image later.

Based on Bitrace’s intelligence database, we also found more useful information, proving that the chat record is also real:

1/ According to our earlier address mark, the entity to which TAiv3g belongs is a guarantee trading platform, and open source network intelligence shows that the platform does operate "overseas labor" related businesses;

2/ The guarantee platform has a deep financial connection with another cryptocurrency payment platform;

3/ At 03:08 on November 19, 2024, TAiv3g collected a deposit of 13928 USDT, and the time and amount are consistent with the screenshot content.

Therefore, these chat records are half true and half false. The original whistleblower fabricated the chat records of Wang Xing being sold based on the real secured transaction scene and other people's information and put them on the Chinese Internet. The motive behind it is unknown.

Conclusion

There is no direct on-chain evidence to show that actor Wang Xing was sold on January 3, 2025 through the cryptocurrency secured trading platform in the chat records, and the photos and name of Wang Xing were forged. However, the secured transaction activities described in the chat records actually existed on the chain on November 19, 2024, indicating that the group did conduct a transaction of 14,000 USDT on that day.

Speaking of which, since this set of chat records is not the exchange of Wang Xing being bought and sold on January 3, 2025, then which "person" or "thing" is related to this transaction on November 19, 2024?

Shudder.

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Appendix: What is a blockchain transaction guarantee platform

The so-called guarantee platform is essentially a transaction intermediary that aims to help both parties to the transaction establish trust and prevent transaction fraud. The platforms we commonly use, such as Xianyu and Alipay, are actually this type of tool.

In the field of black and gray industry transactions, both parties engaged in illegal activities also need guarantee services to establish trust. At present, the institutions that provide guarantee services for black and gray industry transactions generally use the stable currency USDT, so we can see a blockchain address in the screenshots circulated on the Internet.

This address is the blockchain address where the guarantee platform collects the transaction deposit from the buyer. The buyer's transfer behavior is called "upward pledge", and the behavior of obtaining the same amount of transfer from the upper pledge address after the transaction is completed is called "downward pledge".

In this way, the guarantee platform provides protection for various risky trading activities. In Southeast Asia, there are all kinds of guarantee platforms of all sizes, and their businesses are mixed. They not only provide assistance for illegal activities such as fraud and gambling funds laundering, but also provide services for criminal activities such as human trafficking and drug trafficking.