Tether freezes $1.5B from Binance hack in 30 minutes, blocking North Korea

Tether says it froze more than $1.5 billion in USDT within 30 minutes of the Binance hack on 29 October, moving before the stolen funds could be shifted, swapped or laundered. The FBI has identified North Korea as the force behind the attack, according to the stablecoin issuer. U.S. authorities have long warned that crypto theft is a key funding source for North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

The speed was the point. Tether's freezing power only works while the money still sits in reachable wallets, and the company says its team locked the funds down within minutes of the breach. CEO Paolo Ardoino didn't mince words: USDT is, in his telling, the worst possible place for criminals to stash loot, and anyone who thinks otherwise should think again. Tether USA₮ CEO Bo Hines framed the move as a national security play, saying minutes matter in a crisis and that the freeze kept more than $1.5 billion away from the people behind the attack.

It's the latest entry in a busy year of interventions. In April 2026, after hackers tied to North Korea lifted roughly $285 million from the Drift exchange, Tether committed $127.5 million to help users who got hit. That same month, acting on a tip from Treasury's OFAC and U.S. law enforcement, it froze more than $344 million in USDT across two addresses, which OFAC designated as Central Bank of Iran identifiers the next day. A July action froze another $130 million across four wallets, pushing Tether's Iran-linked freezes for the year to nearly $550 million.

Tether has also gone after sanctioned Russian activity, freezing around $23 million tied to the Garantex exchange alongside the U.S. Secret Service. The company runs a wallet-freezing policy aligned with OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals list, and it points to the Blumenthal report episode as proof of its reflexes — during the misinformation campaign that followed, Tether says it froze 99% of the addresses on the reported list before Chainalysis had tagged a single one as Iranian.

The enforcement scaffolding runs deep. Tether says it works with more than 360 law enforcement agencies across 73 countries, and that the FBI and Secret Service have been onboarded to its platform. As of 31 October 2026, it had helped freeze more than 3,590 wallets holding roughly 1.6 billion USDT for the Department of Justice, the Secret Service and the FBI.

Add it all up and Tether says it has frozen upward of 7 billion USDT in secondary market addresses, most of it tied to fraud and theft, especially DeFi and exchange hacks. Around 1.2 billion USDT recovered from fraud and theft has been handed back to owners and law enforcement through reissuance. The Binance freeze is now the headline number in that running tally — and a reminder that the biggest stablecoin issuer can slam a wallet shut faster than anyone can spend it.