Tether Holds Big Operations, Blacklists More Than 30 USDT User Addresses

Tether freezes 30 crypto wallet addresses with multibillion USDT transactions. (Photo; Doc. Olhardigital)

JAKARTA - Tether, the USDT publisher, which is the largest stablecoin on the crypto market, has blocked more than 30 wallet addresses involved in USDT multibillion transactions. This was revealed by Chainargos, a blockchain security firm, who said 28 addresses were blocked on December 1, in the largest freeze operation Tether has ever carried out.

According to Chainargos, most of the blocked addresses came from Whitebit, a European crypto exchange based in Ukraine. These addresses transfer $161 million in USDT, including STUSDT, tokens given to users who stake USDT.

Chainargos also revealed that in August, they discovered suspicious activity in 10,000 wallets that transferred STUSDT in small amounts, between $1 to $10. They called this activity "programmatic spamming."

On December 2, six other wallet addresses were also blocked by Tether, after being detected transferring more than $10 million and storing assets worth about $1 million. Chainargos stated that many blocked wallets were also linked to STUSDT transactions.

Tether has not provided an official explanation of the reason for this blocking. However, Tether has teamed up with US authorities in several criminal cases involving USDT. In November, Tether frozen $225 million linked to a human trafficking syndicate in Southeast Asia, at the request of the US Department of Justice (DOJ). This is the largest USDT freeze of all time.

In addition, in November as well, Tether blocked $9 million in assets stolen through a pig cutting scam scheme, which hit about 70 victims. This case involves cooperation between DOJ and the US Secret Service (USSS), which managed to track the flow of victims' funds washed through various blockchains.