- 5 million USDT were freezed from 12 addresses which were under suspicion.
- MistTrack labelled the addresses as “USDT disabled addresses.”
Tether has frozen 5.2 million USDT from 12 Ethereum addresses linked to phishing groups. These addresses are tagged as USDT-banned addresses by MistTrack. It is an anti-money laundering tracking system developed by SlowMist AML, and used in on-chain analytics to trace illicit funds.
Historically, stablecoin issuers ban suspicious addresses for various reasons connected with law enforcement and criminal activities.
Involvement and Rectification of Tether
According to an X post on March 5, 2024, by PeckShield, a blockchain security firm, Tether has blacklisted four addresses with a total holding of $21.2 million in USDT. The largest address held 20.1 million USDT, followed by two with $500,000 USDT each. And the last one had a balance of $217,000 USDT.
In January 2024, a U.N. report mentioned the illicit involvement of USDT. Furthermore, Tether had taken security measures like developing a monitoring tool, and almost 300 million were frozen in the last few months.
Tether claims that it holds all U.S. dollars in reserve to meet withdrawals upon demand. Long back it has been criticized for the lack of transparency and verifiability of its claimed fiat currencies in reserves. The stablecoin issuer froze $817,000 USDT connected to terrorist activity in Ukraine and Israel in 2023, a month later, it froze $225 million linked to romance scammers.
Recently, the Ripple CEO said that the U.S. government is behind Tether, and he is insecure about the impact it may have on the overall crypto market. Meanwhile, Tether’s CEO, Paulo Ardoino, claimed that Ripple’s chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse, was spreading doubts and uncertainty about USDT.
Ardoino further expressed his discontent with the adverse claims about Tether, even after the impressive performance of their firm. He defended USDT by stating that the stablecoin is popular and trustworthy, with millions of users, and is backed by strong reserves.
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