The founder of Evita Pay has been targeted, with the U.S. DOJ directly throwing out 22 charges.
Another serious player using stablecoins has gotten into trouble.
What do you think about this matter?
USDT itself is not at fault, but when it becomes a tool for circumventing cross-border sanctions, the risks become real.
Let's take a look at the scale of illegal activities involving $USDT:
2022: The scale of USDT involvement in Southeast Asian gray and black market platforms exceeded $115 billion, with gambling funds accounting for $37.16 billion, money laundering funds for $69.78 billion, and fraud funds below $460 million.
2024: 5.14% of global stablecoin transactions flow to high-risk addresses, with the scale of USDT involved in illegal activities reaching $649 billion (accounting for 5.15% of total stablecoin transaction volume).
Main illegal application scenarios for USDT:
1. Online gambling:
In 2024, gambling funds accounted for 33% of illegal USDT flow, reaching $217 billion (an annual increase of 17.5%).
Gambers purchase USDT through OTC exchanges, deposit it into overseas gambling platforms, and use score teams to split the funds, avoiding regulatory oversight.
2. Money laundering and underground banks:
Score teams and money laundering: Score platforms recruit personnel with a model earning 150~200 yuan commission per USDT transaction, converting the involved funds into USDT. In 2024, the scale of money laundering reached $86.3 billion.
Funds are transferred abroad using fictitious trade contracts with USDT. For example, in a USDT score case cracked in Guangdong, 120 million yuan of involved funds circulated through 120 gambling websites.
3. Fraud and pig-butchering scams.
In 2023, the U.S. jointly froze 225 million USDT from a Southeast Asian gang with Tether, with the stolen funds transferred through a fraudulent investment platform.
In 2024, fraud-related USDT flow reached $52.5 billion, with some cases seeing losses exceeding 10 million yuan (such as the Hangzhou Asia-Pacific Exchange scam).
4. Drug trafficking and dark web transactions:
Drug dealers use USDT's anonymity to collect drug payments, for instance, a couple in Changchun transferred drug funds through a Bitcoin address and then exchanged it for USDT to evade bank regulations.
Dark web platforms generally accept USDT payments, and on-chain paths are blocked from tracking through multiple mixers (such as Tornado Cash).
The core issue of USDT in gray and black markets lies in its liquidity, anonymity, and cross-border convenience being systematically exploited by criminal networks.
Although on-chain freezing and regulatory collaboration (such as the T3 financial crime unit established by Tether and Tron) have improved efficiency in combating crime, techniques like coin mixing and decentralized scoring models still leave about 95% of illegal funds unrecognized.
The recent Evita Pay incident has made it clear: when stablecoins become tools for sanction arbitrage, regulators cannot turn a blind eye any longer.
What needs to be done now is to enforce rules and laws rigorously, and to seal off the loophole of gray market activities.
#EvitaPay #USDT
