Tether and Binance Entangled in $61M Iran Oil Seizure
US prosecutors have filed a civil forfeiture complaint seeking $61 million in Tether's USDT tied to alleged black-market Iranian oil sales. The funds are frozen across 10 Tron addresses, and authorities claim they came from Iranian crude and petroleum sales intended for the country's government and military.
The tokens were already immobilized by Tether, which froze seven of the targeted addresses in June 2025 and another three in July. A seizure warrant issued this week allows federal agents to move the value into government custody, but executing it would depend on Tether's control over USDT.
Tether can burn the frozen tokens and issue replacements of the same value for transfer to an FBI-controlled hardware wallet. This mechanism gives US authorities a route from identifying sanctioned funds on-chain to taking custody without obtaining the private keys controlling the original wallets.
The $61 million seizure is just a fraction of a network prosecutors say moved over $1.5 billion, which involved Binance and traditional banking channels. Investigators claim that a cluster of interconnected addresses received and distributed more than $1.5 billion in proceeds from alleged illicit Iranian oil sales.