Tether has frozen approximately 5.2 million USDT across 12 ethereum addresses associated with illicit operations.
The CSO of MistTrack shared on his social media account that Tether stopped a phishing gang’s illicit money activities. This confirms the ongoing investigation conducted by the company.
“It looks like Tether froze the phishing gang’s money laundering address today.”
According to MistTrack’s findings, these 12 Ethereum addresses were flagged as “USDT disabled addresses,” indicating potential involvement in illicit activities. SlowMist has raised suspicions that these addresses could be linked to money laundering operations orchestrated by phishing groups.
The tracking is part of a move by Tether to freeze funds associated with the addresses due to suspected illicit activities or compliance concerns. When an address is flagged as a “USDT disabled address,” it means that Tether has taken action to restrict the use of USDT tokens associated with those addresses, effectively freezing them to prevent further transactions.
However, there are no further mentions of the owners of the addresses or what exactly the funds are designed to be used for.
MistTrack is an anti-money laundering (AML) tracking system developed by SlowMist that uses on-chain analytics to assist in tracing illicit funds on various blockchain networks. SlowMist is a third-party Blockchain and smart contract audit company.
MistTrack assigns an AML risk score to addresses based on their interactions on the blockchain, providing insight into the level of suspicious activity.
It currently supports address investigation on Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), TRON, Bitcoin, Polygon, IoTeX, Avalanche-C, Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet, Base, zkSync Era and Merlin Chain networks. The list of supported chains is expected to expand further.
Tether has played a crucial role in preventing the flow of illicit funds through the USDT infrastructure. In March 2024, Tether blacklisted four addresses containing a total of $21.2 million in USDT. The largest address held 20.1 million USDT, while the other three held smaller amounts.
By December 2023, Tether had banned 1,281 addresses holding a total of 955,003,830 USDT. In 2023, Tether also blacklisted addresses linked with terrorist organizations.
