Tether (USDT), the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, has frozen a series of wallets associated with individuals on the sanctions list of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). This move is described by Tether as a voluntary measure aimed at preventing bad actors from abusing USDT and enhancing security.
According to data from Etherscan, Tether Tether froze 161 Ethereum wallets on December 10, including 150 wallets that did not hold USDT and 11 wallets that were holding more than 3.5 million USDT in reserve. Among these 11 wallets, one wallet holds over 3.4 million USDT.
Blockchain detective ZachXBT linked this wallet to the hack of betting platform Stake and found that the address had been quite active in the past week, before it was frozen.
Of the remaining 10 wallets holding USDT, there are 2 wallets holding about 20,000 tokens each, and 1 wallet holding 60,000. Another wallet holding 0.6 USDT only, two days ago, was used to transfer more than 400,000 USDT received from THORChain through 2 other wallets, making it difficult to trace.
Data also showed that some wallets have used Tornado Cash mixing services in the past 6 months. One of the frozen wallets is believed to be linked to the Ronin attack, in which the US Treasury Department accused the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group of being the mastermind.
This is not the first time Tether freezes illegal wallets. Previously, in Oct 2023, it froze 32 wallets associated with terrorism and the Ukraine-Israel war. Tether also confiscated $225 million related to a human trafficking organization following an investigation by the US Department of Justice.