- Tether froze over US$12.3M in USDT on Tron as part of its sanctions and AML enforcement, targeting wallets flagged under OFAC and related to financial crimes.
- The company has intensified its blacklist strategy, previously freezing US$27M linked to sanctioned Russian exchange Garantex and cutting off major liquidity channels.
- Through the T3 Financial Crime Unit with TRON DAO and TRM Labs, Tether has frozen US$126M in six months.
Tether has blacklisted more than US$12.3M (AU$18.4M) worth of USDT on the Tron blockchain. The freeze was executed at 9:15 a.m. UTC on Sunday, according to data from Tronscan.
This action shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the company’s disclosed enforcement framework, which allows for unilateral wallet freezes, mostly to comply with US sanctions compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) directives.
According to Tether’s March policy update, the firm actively enforces blocks against addresses linked to terrorism financing, weapons proliferation, and violations of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List.
While it has received mixed reactions from the crypto community —that is, putting into question the whole decentralisation narrative— the company claims this mechanism “follows global financial integrity standards” while making sure its operational ties please US oversight expectations.
Related: Japanese Firms Double Down on Bitcoin: ANAP and Remixpoint Boost Holdings Beyond ¥17 Billion
Tether’s Effort Against Money Laundering Operations
All in all, Tether has escalated its coordinated blacklisting and freezing tactics, extending a crackdown that now spans more than a decade and billions of dollars in frozen stablecoins.
The most visible move this year came in March, when Tether blacklisted US$27M (AU$41M) tied to Garantex, a Russian crypto exchange sanctioned by OFAC for persistent AML failures. The freeze cut off access to critical liquidity and effectively shut down the platform’s operations.
Since mid-2024, Tether has been working alongside TRON DAO and TRM Labs through a dedicated enforcement initiative called the T3 Financial Crime Unit. In just six months, the unit has frozen more than US$126M (AU$193M) in suspect transactions, reviewing over US$3B (AU$4.6B) in USDT flows across five continents.
Most of the blocked funds trace back to laundering operations, but the scope extends to terror financing, scam networks, and state-linked actors. Over US$200M (AU$306M) has been tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group alone.
Related: Trump Teases More Crypto Action in Prerecorded Coinbase Summit Address
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