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Tether is used by criminals far more than you think
It has been repeatedly suggested that billions of dollars worth of Tether have been laundered through pig slaughter and sextortion scams, and it’s a problem that’s getting worse, not better.
A new in-depth report has revealed how USDT stable currency It is widely used as a payment method in a criminal market, with illicit activities wallets receiving more than $11 billion in the last three years.
Source: Elliptical
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic He says Bind It is the primary payment method of a platform called Huione Guarantee, which facilitates transactions on behalf of cybercriminals and their clients.
Some merchants claim they can help with money laundrymostly with illicit profits from pig slaughter incidents. Others say they are willing to help manage the proceeds of sextortion scams.
For the uninitiated, pig slaughter scams involve scammers gradually gaining the trust of unsuspecting individuals, often by pretending to be romantically interested, and encouraging them to gradually invest their entire life savings in too-good-to-be-true cryptocurrency investments.
Thanks to the Huione Guarantee, you can even hire people to create websites for these fake investment opportunities and acquire “Artificial intelligence software that changes your face so scammers can communicate convincingly with their prey.
Source: Elliptical
Countless billions of dollars have been lost due to pig slaughter scamsBut it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, more often than not, the people charged with carrying out these crimes are also victims. They often travel to Southeast Asian nations like Cambodia and Myanmar in the hope of a well-paid job, only to be imprisoned and have their passports confiscated.
Horrifyingly, items to torture these workers are also sold on Huione Guarantee, including chains that inflict electric shocks and truncheons to beat them.
“Some of these forced laborers resort to suicide or die in suspicious circumstances,” the Elliptic inquiry warned.
Source: Elliptical
The authors highlighted “overwhelming evidence” that Huione Guarantee’s “predominant role is to act as an illicit marketplace.” And in another surreal development, the platform appears to have ties to a large Cambodian company that deals in everything from airlines to real estate, with an executive who is closely related to the country’s prime minister.
While the report sheds a new light on the scale of pig slaughter scams, Elliptic said one of the benefits of cryptocurrency payments is “blockchain transparency,” as USDT flows can be monitored and frozen to deprive scammers of revenue.
“Following our investigation, hundreds of cryptocurrency addresses controlled by Huione companies and used by merchants operating on Huione Guarantee have been tagged in Elliptic’s tools,” he added.
Repressive measures continue
There is also growing evidence that Tether is being used to orchestrate criminal activity in China, where the use of cryptocurrencies is banned.
In May, a large clandestine ring that allowed individuals to circumvent strict foreign exchange rules and send funds abroad was busted by police, with local media reporting that $1.9 billion was transferred abroad.
The United Nations also shed light on the issue in January, when it said that USDT on By Justin Sun Trunk Blockchain has “become the preferred choice for regional cyber fraud operations and money launderers, due to its stability and the ease, anonymity and low fees of its transactions.”
Over a 12-month period, estimates suggested that more than $17 billion in Tether was “linked to underground currency exchanges, illegal commodity trading, illicit collection and payment processes, and various criminal activities.”
Evidence has also mounted that the kidnappers demanded USDT as a ransom. Two unemployed women brazenly kidnapped a three-year-old boy from a Hong Kong shopping mall and later left a note instructing the mother to pay $640,000 worth of Tether to a wallet. The perpetrators were later arrested and the boy was fortunately unharmed.
A recent report from TRM Labs went on to state that Tether was by far the stablecoin with the highest illicit volume, with estimates suggesting that 1.63% of transactions were linked to criminal activity. In comparison, this figure dropped to just 0.05% of transactions involving USDC.
This has also had implications for terrorist financing, and while cryptocurrency exchanges and payment processors have begun to crack down in recent years, TRON remains popular.
“Among terrorist financing campaigns that continued to accept cryptocurrency, the number of unique TRON addresses receiving Tether (USDT) increased by 125%,” the report noted.
Responding to these allegations, a Tether spokesperson told Bloomberg:
“Historical evidence repeatedly shows that transaction figures have often been exaggerated due to a misinterpretation of the data that assumes that if a service receives a small portion of illicit funds, then all the funds in the service are illicit, significantly inflating the actual values.”
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