Paid to a frozen wallet: 104M USDT sent to addresses Tether had already frozen

A Tether freeze stops an address from sending USDT, not from receiving it. FreezeCheck counted every transfer of 1 USDT or more that reached a TRON address after Tether had frozen it, from November 2025 to November 2026.

104.2MUSDT sent to addresses that were already frozen

3,030transfers from 1,943 senders to 980 frozen addresses

86.3MUSDT still locked on 863 of those addresses

18.0MUSDT already burned by Tether with the rest of the balance

324senders paid a frozen address more than once

31 hoursmedian time between the freeze and the transfer

Bar chart: USDT sent to already frozen TRON addresses by time after the freeze. Under 1 hour 11.2 million, 1 to 24 hours 42.8 million, 1 to 7 days 33.4 million, 7 to 30 days 13.3 million, over 30 days 3.6 million. — USDT sent to already frozen addresses, by time after the freeze. Data: all 3,030 transfers with block numbers, CSV.

Key findings

The freeze blocks sending, not receiving. The USDT contract on TRON checks the sender of a transfer, not the recipient. A payment to a frozen address goes through as usual, and the money is stuck there.
Most of it is not a race with the freeze. 278 transfers (11.2M USDT) came within an hour of the freeze and may have been queued already. Half came more than 31 hours later, and 378 transfers came more than a month later.
A few large payments make the total. The median transfer was 300 USDT. 218 transfers of 100,000 USDT or more add up to 83.6M, 80% of the total. The largest, 5,000,000 USDT on December 24, 2025, arrived 37 hours after the freeze; that address received 9.9M after it was frozen and is still frozen.
People keep paying. 324 senders sent money to a frozen address more than once after the freeze: 1,411 transfers, 39.0M USDT.
Exchanges pay frozen addresses too. Wallets our labels attribute to exchanges made 665 of these transfers, 7.5M USDT. One exchange hot wallet sent 115 withdrawals to 29 already frozen addresses, 735,819 USDT. Payment services sent another 4.3M.
Sanctioned addresses kept receiving. 63 recipients are on sanctions lists; they received 4.45M USDT after the freeze.
Part of it is destroyed. 117 of the addresses were later burned with 18.0M of this money on them. Across all 553 burns of the year, 55.4M of the 318.6M USDT destroyed (17.4%) had arrived after the freeze.

What to do if you send USDT

Check the recipient right before you send, not only the sender of the money you receive. On TRON, isBlackListed(address) on the USDT contract answers in one call, or paste the address into @freezecheck_bot.
Re-check addresses you pay regularly. A frozen counterparty looks the same in your address book.
For payouts and withdrawals, check at signing time. 9 in 10 of these transfers came more than an hour after the freeze, when a check would have caught it.

Method

Freezes. 3,476 TRON addresses frozen by Tether between November 2025 and November 2026 and still frozen on November 8, 2026. The freeze time is the execution of the 2-of-3 multisig transaction, as in the signing window.
Transfers. All USDT TRC-20 transfers to these addresses, read from the full transfer stream through SQD Portal. Counted: 1 USDT or more, strictly after the freeze.
Burns. DestroyedBlackFunds events of the same period, as in unfreezes and burns. The burned share is capped at the burned amount per address.
Senders. Labelled with FreezeCheck's base: exchange hot wallets and deposit addresses (proof of reserves, public tags, deposit sweeping), payment services, sanctions lists. Labels derived from links to frozen addresses are not used here, to avoid counting in a circle. Most senders have no public label; we do not try to identify them.
Scope. Addresses unfrozen before November 8, 2026 are not included. The study describes transfers only; it does not say why an address was frozen or who sent the money.

For media and researchers

Data under CC BY 4.0: every transfer with time, block, sender, recipient and status, CSV, chart in English and Russian. Questions: hello@freezecheck.org · press page.

Paid to a frozen wallet: 104M USDT sent to addresses Tether had already frozen

Key findings

What to do if you send USDT

Method

For media and researchers

More FreezeCheck research