Tether CEO unveils new security measures, involving FBI and Secret Service, to prevent illicit use of stablecoins.

Tether’s new CEO Paolo Ardoino has outlined expanded security and compliance measures aimed at curbing the illicit use of its USDT stablecoin, including formally onboarding the U.S. Secret Service and preparing to onboard the FBI onto Tether’s platform. In letters made public and sent to members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and the House Financial Services Committee, Ardoino detailed how these law-enforcement integrations are intended to give agencies more direct access and tooling to monitor and respond to suspicious on-chain activity involving USDT. Tether framed the move as part of a broader effort to show “total cooperation” with U.S. and global authorities and to distance the company from narratives that stablecoins are primarily facilitating crime. These measures build on a new wallet-freezing policy that Tether implemented on December 1, under which it proactively freezes addresses associated with the U.S. Treasury’s OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanctions list. According to Ardoino, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice, Secret Service and FBI, Tether has helped freeze 326 wallets holding about $435 million in USDT, as well as more than 200 sanctioned wallets on Ethereum that together contained over $3.5 million. The company argues that these actions demonstrate that centralized stablecoins can be actively policed and used to support asset recovery and crime-fighting efforts, a point of growing importance as U.S. lawmakers scrutinize stablecoins’ role in terrorism financing, sanctions evasion, and other illicit finance. The announcement positions Tether as an increasingly cooperative counterpart for U.S. enforcement agencies at a time when regulatory pressure on crypto intermediaries is intensifying. By emphasizing its ability to track activity and freeze tokens at the contract level, Tether is implicitly drawing a contrast with more decentralized crypto assets that cannot be controlled in the same way, while also signaling to regulators that large dollar-pegged stablecoins can be integrated into traditional financial-crime controls. For users and the broader market, the moves underscore that holding and transacting in centralized stablecoins like USDT carries embedded compliance and censorship risk alongside the benefits of dollar liquidity and speed, and that law enforcement can increasingly intervene directly at the issuer level when funds are linked to sanctioned entities or criminal investigations.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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