Tether has frozen $3.3 billion across 7,268 wallets and they just added $344 million more

On April 23, 2026 Tether froze $344 million in USDT across two Tron wallets in coordination with the US Treasury and OFAC, tied to sanctions enforcement against Iran
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department "sanctioned several wallets linked to Iran" and would "trace the money Tehran desperately tries to move out of the country"
It's the biggest single freeze in stablecoin history and it happened in one transaction
Whether the target deserved it or not is not the point, the point is that one company made $344 million vanish from two wallets without a judge, a warrant or an appeal and this was not the first time
Since 2023 Tether has blacklisted 7,268 wallets and frozen a combined $3.29 billion
In 2025 alone they froze $1.26 billion and permanently burned $698 million of it, meaning the original holders did not get their money back, the tokens were destroyed and new USDT was minted to wallets controlled by the government
Only 3.6% of blacklisted wallets ever got unfrozen
33.7% of the addresses had zero balance when they were frozen, which means Tether is freezing the wallets that received the money, not the ones that stole it and most of the time the innocent person holding the money ends up losing it
The mechanism is one line of code called addBlackList that only Tether can call
There is no court order, no appeal process, no warning and once the function executes all your USDT transfers revert at the block level
This works on every chain Tether deploys to, Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Avalanche, TON, Celo and Cosmos
Even cold wallets get frozen, offline hardware does not protect you because the freeze happens on the smart contract, not on your device
Tether also has a second function called DestroyBlackFunds that burns your tokens and mints new ones to a government wallet and once they use it the tokens are gone forever
Paolo Ardoino said "USDT is not a safe haven for illicit activity" which sounds reasonable until you read Tether's own Terms of Service
Section 8.15 says Tether can freeze your tokens "as required by applicable law or where Tether, in its sole discretion, determines it is prudent to do so"
Which means whenever they want
Tether works with 340 law enforcement agencies across 65 countries and has helped process 2,300 investigations
In April 2025 a Texas firm called Riverstone Consultancy sued Tether after it froze $45 million of their money at the request of the Bulgarian Police and the suit alleges Tether bypassed every legal procedure required
A foreign police force can freeze an American company's balance through Tether before a single court has reviewed the case
You hold a dollar token issued by an unaudited company legally based in El Salvador that can erase your balance on request from any of 340 agencies in 65 countries and the only thing required is one function call
The banks you avoid needs a court order, an appeal process and an FDIC insurance claim to freeze your account
The stablecoin that replaced them needs none of those things