U.S. moved to forfeit 225.4 million USDT tied to scams

The U.S. Justice Department filed a verified civil forfeiture complaint on June 18, 2025 seeking ownership of exactly 225,364,961 USDT that investigators had seized after tracing funds through an alleged cryptocurrency-investment-fraud laundering network.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia as *United States v. Approximately 225,364,961 USDT*, the complaint alleged that the stablecoins represented proceeds traceable to wire fraud or property involved in money laundering. The Justice Department described the approximately $225.3 million seizure as the largest cryptocurrency seizure in U.S. Secret Service history.

That description required two qualifications on June 18. It was an agency record, not an independently compiled ranking of every government cryptocurrency seizure. More importantly, the filing began a civil proceeding; it was not a final forfeiture judgment establishing every allegation or permanently transferring the assets to the government.

From suspected victims to seven token groups

The complaint said overseas actors stole funds from more than 430 suspected victims. Investigators interviewed approximately 60 of them, who collectively reported losing about $19 million in cryptocurrency. Those figures described the investigative sample and suspected network, not a finding that every dollar within the seized pool came from those interviewed victims.

According to the government, cryptocurrency exchange OKX alerted law enforcement to 144 accounts it believed were receiving and transferring scam proceeds. Investigators identified 93 initial deposit addresses and alleged that confirmed victim funds moved through intermediary addresses into 22 of those OKX accounts. The funds then allegedly circulated through much of the wider account network before reaching seven addresses holding the property named in the complaint.

The filing said coordinated transaction patterns, overlapping counterparties, similar account names, customer-identification records and shared internet addresses connected the accounts. It also disclosed a limitation in the tracing: investigators used a last-in, first-out methodology when following identified victim deposits. That accounting convention helped associate transfers across commingled funds, but it was an investigative tracing method rather than proof that individual token units carried an immutable criminal label.

A public ledger met centralized controls

The complaint stated that a federal magistrate judge issued a seizure warrant on May 1, 2025. By the June 18 filing, the defendant property was in U.S. Marshals Service custody. The Justice Department credited the FBI and Secret Service with blockchain analysis and thanked Tether for what it called proactive assistance.

The institutional significance extended beyond the size of the pool. Public transaction records allowed investigators to reconstruct movements across addresses, while cooperation from an exchange and the company managing USDT’s contracts supplied controls unavailable from blockchain observation alone. That combination demonstrated how a dollar-linked token could be traced and restrained even when an alleged laundering network used numerous accounts and intermediary addresses.

It did not establish that every blockchain is equally traceable or that every issuer, exchange or jurisdiction would cooperate. Nor did it mean ordinary USDT holders were implicated by the case.

The scale of reported fraud

The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Complaint Center report provided the contemporaneous backdrop. It recorded 41,557 cryptocurrency-investment-fraud complaints and approximately $5.8 billion in reported losses during calendar 2024, increases of 29% and 47%, respectively, from 2023.

Those were complaint-derived U.S. reporting statistics. They were not audited global loss totals, and unreported or incorrectly categorized cases could make the underlying scale different. No reliable evidence reviewed for this reconstruction established that the June 18 complaint caused a measurable change in USDT’s price, supply or trading volume.

The headline amount was the complaint’s exact token count, rounded to 225.4 million USDT. The Justice Department’s dollar description—more than $225.3 million—relied on USDT’s intended dollar peg rather than a specified exchange, timestamp or market-price window. On June 18, the central unresolved questions were whether the government would obtain a final forfeiture order, how many victims could establish claims and how much seized property could ultimately be returned.