Recently, official information showed that the T3 Financial Crime Unit ( T3 FCU), jointly established by TRON, Tether and TRM Labs, has frozen more than 126 million USDT of suspected criminal assets in five continents since its launch in August 2024. This achievement marks an important step for T3 FCU in combating blockchain-related financial crimes.
In response, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, posted on his personal X platform on January 2: “ T3 FCU’s achievement in rapidly freezing criminal assets sends a clear signal: If you use USDT to commit crimes on the TRON network, you will definitely be caught.”
Since its establishment, T3 FCU has quickly become a model of multi-party cooperation in the field of preventing blockchain financial crimes. By working closely with global law enforcement agencies to identify and dismantle criminal networks, T3 FCU has successfully intervened in cases involving serious financial crimes such as money laundering, investment fraud, extortion, and terrorist financing.
To date, T3 FCU has analyzed millions of transactions covering five continents, and has monitored a total USDT transaction volume of more than 3 billion US dollars. It has achieved remarkable results in combating various illegal activities on the chain, and the sources of frozen funds include suspected money laundering (65 million US dollars), investment fraud (36 million US dollars), illegal drug trafficking (11 million US dollars), terrorist financing (5.5 million US dollars), extortion fraud (3 million US dollars), hacker attacks (2 million US dollars) and violent crimes (1 million US dollars).
T3 FCU relies on TRM Labs blockchain smart monitoring tools to assist TRON and Tether in identifying and freezing USDT funds suspected of being associated with criminal activities. Chris Janczewski, global head of investigations at TRM Labs, said: Money laundering through blockchain is a bad choice because its transparency makes criminal behavior invisible. We are able to confirm victim reports and even identify other potential victims through the public blockchain, which is not possible in the traditional financial system.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, stressed the importance of the collaboration: “Tether is committed to maintaining the integrity of the financial ecosystem through active cooperation with law enforcement agencies around the world. By working with authorities in multiple jurisdictions, Tether plays an important role in freezing suspected criminal assets and ensuring that bad actors cannot use stablecoins such as USDT to conduct illegal activities. Our close collaboration with TRON and TRM demonstrates the transformative power of improving transparency, security, and accountability in the digital asset space.”
In addition, the USDT issuance volume on TRON is about 60 billion US dollars, currently only slightly behind Ethereum, which further highlights the important position of TRON in the blockchain ecosystem. The success of T3 FCU also provides a reference template for global digital asset security supervision.
“T3 FCU worked closely with global law enforcement agencies to successfully prevent cybercriminals from using USDT on TRON, which proves the feasibility of the public-private partnership model,” said Chris Janczewski. “We hope that through our efforts, we can not only help victims recover their funds, but also make criminals think twice when using blockchain for illegal activities.” In the future, as more legitimate users join the rapidly developing crypto ecosystem, T3 FCU will continue to be committed to maintaining ecological security.
