The T3 Financial Crimes Unit, a collaboration between blockchain Tron, stablecoin issuer Tether and blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, said it has frozen a total of 100 million USDT of Tether used by actors illicit since the unit was formed in September.
The company analyzed millions of transactions across five continents, monitoring a total volume of more than 3 billion USDT, the largest stablecoin, T3 said in a statement.
T3 involves TRM Labs using its blockchain intelligence and monitoring tools to help Tron and Tether identify and freeze USDT linked to illicit activities. There is almost $60 billion in USDT issued on the Tron blockchain, the largest issuance behind Ethereum, which has just over $75 billion.
Money laundering as a service, where bad actors hire entities on the dark web to clean illicit funds, is the largest source of frozen funds, said Chris Janczewski, head of global investigations at TRM Labs. Investment scams, illicit drugs , terrorism financing, blackmail scams, hacks, exploits and even violent crimes have also been targets, he said in an interview with CoinDesk.
“Blockchain is a bad place to launder money because it is so transparent. We can confirm victim reports on a public blockchain and even identify other victims, a level of insight that is simply not possible with traditional finance,” he said. Janczewski.
Up to 3 million of the frozen USDT had ties to North Korea, which has actively attempted to infiltrate crypto projects in order to raise funds for the country’s leadership regime, T3 said. The US Treasury Department announced in December that it had shut down a North Korean money laundering ring.
“Ultimately, we hope that through our efforts, not only will victims recover their funds, but bad actors will think twice before engaging in illicit activities on blockchains like Tron,” Janczewski said.
