TL;DR
- Tether helped the DOJ recover $61 million stolen through pig butchering fraud.
- The company froze over $4.2 billion in illicit assets across 64 countries.
- Tether now cooperates with more than 310 law enforcement agencies worldwide simultaneously.
Every cryptocurrency transaction leaves a permanent record that no one can erase, alter, or hide from investigators with the right tools and the right partners. That property, which critics often frame as a privacy liability, functioned this week as the mechanism that allowed law enforcement to recover nearly $61 million stolen from fraud victims across multiple countries. The United States Department of Justice publicly acknowledged Tether for the direct role its cooperation played in making that recovery possible.
The fraud scheme at the center of the case belongs to a category known as pig butchering — a form of investment fraud where perpetrators spend weeks or months cultivating trust with their targets before persuading them to deposit funds into fictitious trading platforms.
The name refers to the process of fattening a victim’s confidence before draining everything they invested. Individual losses in these schemes tend to be catastrophic: entire life savings wiped out, debt taken on to invest more, and psychological damage that outlasts the financial harm by years.
The investigation began when Homeland Security agents in Raleigh, North Carolina received a report from a victim of the alleged fraud. Working from that initial complaint, investigators mapped the stolen funds across multiple digital wallets and identified addresses still holding large balances.
Tether worked alongside those investigators in real time, enabling the asset freeze before the perpetrators could disperse the funds across additional wallets, chains, or exchange platforms. Speed determined the outcome. The window between a successful fraud and an irreversible dispersal of stolen funds can close in hours, and the collaboration between Tether and federal agents stayed ahead of that window.
The contrast with traditional banking enforcement is worth noting. A cross-border asset freeze through conventional financial channels requires coordination between correspondent banks, foreign regulators, and judicial systems operating on incompatible timelines.
The same action executed through Tether’s infrastructure compresses that process from days into hours, which explains why law enforcement agencies from dozens of countries actively seek the company’s involvement when tracing illicit digital assets.
More Than $4.2 Billion Frozen Across 64 Countries and 310 Agencies
The $61 million recovery fits inside a much larger pattern of enforcement cooperation that Tether built over several years. The company now works with more than 310 law enforcement agencies across more than 64 countries, and the cumulative total of assets it froze in connection with illicit activity surpassed $4.2 billion.
The case record from the past twelve months alone covers a wide range of crime types and jurisdictions. In July 2025, Tether enabled a civil forfeiture action against a money transfer company tied to terror financing linked to Gaza-based organizations, blocking $1.6 million in USDT. One month earlier, the company worked alongside the DOJ and the exchange OKX to support a seizure of approximately $225 million connected to additional pig butchering operations — the same fraud category as the current case, operating at a far larger scale.
Brazilian authorities credited Tether’s assistance in June 2025 when investigators dismantled a cross-border money laundering scheme running through Klever Wallet, blocking the equivalent of $6.2 million.
That same month, the US Secret Service froze $23 million in funds traced to transactions on Garantex, the Russia-based exchange operating under international sanctions, with Tether providing direct technical support. Earlier, in November 2024, the Royal Thai Police and the US Secret Service traced and seized $12 million from a transnational scam network using the same investigative infrastructure Tether makes available to partner agencies.
What connects every case on that list is an operational capability that conventional finance cannot replicate at equivalent speed: the ability to trace the exact path of specific funds through public blockchain records, cross-reference wallet addresses against sanctions lists and known criminal infrastructure, and execute a freeze before the funds move again. Each of those steps happens on a timeline that traditional correspondent banking simply cannot match.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, stated that blockchain transparency gives law enforcement a tool it can use quickly and effectively against financial crime. The company didn’t stop at making that statement — it built the internal infrastructure to back it up, investing in analytics teams and dedicated cooperation units capable of responding to simultaneous requests from multiple jurisdictions without losing operational speed.
The public debate around stablecoins and criminal activity frequently rests on a flawed premise: that the pseudonymous nature of crypto transactions protects bad actors from accountability. The documented case history tells a different story.
Blockchain records don’t expire, don’t get shredded, and don’t disappear when a correspondent bank closes an account. Funds moved through USDT leave a trail that investigators can follow months or years after the original transaction, across any number of intermediate wallets, with a level of forensic fidelity that offshore banking accounts have never offered.
Recovering $61 million doesn’t undo what pig butchering victims lost in terms of trust, time, or the particular anguish of realizing someone spent months pretending to care before stealing everything. But the outcome of this week’s case demonstrates something worth stating plainly: the same technology that critics argue enables financial crime also enables the most precise and rapid form of financial crime investigation ever built.
