USDT seizure of $61m: no keys needed, Tether burned the tokens

Prosecutors in Manhattan filed a civil forfeiture complaint on Monday against $61.19 million of USDT that they tie to black-market sales of sanctioned Iranian oil, Cointelegraph reports. Nobody took a private key to do it.

“Today we are seizing and seeking to forfeit more than $61 million of the Government of Iran's money, which otherwise would have promoted hostile military action and terrorist attacks against the U.S. and our allies.”

— Sean S. Buckley, Statement, U.S. Attorney's Office, SDNY, 14 September 2026

Sean S. Buckley, Deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement of 14 September 2026

How the seizure works

A seizure warrant dated 14 September tells the FBI how to take custody, and the method is the whole story. Tether will destroy the frozen tokens sitting in ten Tron addresses and issue replacements of the same value into a hardware wallet the bureau controls. The coins never move in the ordinary sense. The issuer writes off one balance and writes on another, and the government ends up holding dollars it can spend.

That option exists because USDT has an issuer with a blacklist and a mint function. Run the same complaint against bitcoin and the FBI needs the keys, which means finding a person who has them. Tether froze the ten addresses in 2025, so the money has been immobile for months while the paperwork caught up.

The sums are small against the network they sit in. Tether has issued $94.26 billion of USDT on Tron across 76.5 million holding addresses, and $61.19 million is 0.065% of that, one dollar in every 1,540. Ten addresses out of 76.5 million carried enough to make a federal case.

USDT seizure: what it reaches

The complaint describes a network that moved more than $1.5 billion in oil proceeds through unhosted wallets, an Iranian exchange and money-transfer businesses linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The $61.19 million now in play is 4.08% of that figure. Prosecutors are not claiming to have caught the other 96%, and the filing does not say where it went.

Two Hong Kong companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, ran accounts at Binance to convert proceeds from oil sold to Chinese buyers, the complaint alleges. Blessed Trust presents itself as a wealth manager and custodian and provided on-ramp services through US issuers. Binance is not a defendant and the filing alleges no wrongdoing by the exchange, whose spokesperson said it permits no transactions with sanctioned individuals and will keep cooperating with law enforcement.

How it got here

The Treasury widened its Iran sanctions framework in August to cover the country's digital asset sector, which lets Washington act against foreign firms working in it. It alleged at the time that Ivan Obukhov, a broker based in the UAE, had processed more than $100 million in crypto payments since 2023 for the Quds Force. One broker, in other words, moved 1.63 times what this complaint now seeks. The war that began in February still runs, and Reuters reported on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline remained offline after Friday's attacks, which crypto felt through risk assets rather than through oil directly.

Earlier this month Tether faced a lawsuit over a $42.4 million freeze that a plaintiff says arrived before any warrant. This case runs the other way: the court paper came first, and the freeze it relies on is more than a year old. The same property that makes Tron the largest home for stablecoins makes it the easiest place to take them back. The allegations remain unproven, and Washington gains permanent ownership only if a judge enters a forfeiture judgment.

Informational material, not legal or investment advice. The allegations described here remain unproven in court.