$104M in USDT sent to TRON addresses Tether had already frozen

Originally published by FreezeCheck at freezecheck.org. Data under CC BY 4.0. Prepared with the help of AI tools; all figures come from our on-chain data.

A Tether freeze stops an address from sending USDT. It does not stop it from receiving. The USDT contract on TRON checks the sender of a transfer, not the recipient, so a payment to a blacklisted address goes through as usual, and the money is stuck there.

We went through every USDT transfer on TRON from 12 November 2025 to 8 November 2026 and counted the ones that reached an address after Tether had already frozen it.

The numbers

• 104.2M USDT in 3,030 transfers from 1,943 senders to 980 frozen addresses.
• 86.3M USDT is still locked on 863 of those addresses. 18.0M sat on 117 addresses whose balances Tether later burned.
• It is not a race with the freeze. Half of the transfers came more than 31 hours after it; 9 in 10 came more than an hour after.
• A few large payments make the total. The median transfer is 300 USDT, but 218 transfers of 100,000 USDT or more add up to 83.6M. The largest, 5,000,000 USDT, arrived 37 hours after the freeze.
• People keep paying. 324 senders paid a frozen address more than once: 1,411 transfers, 39.0M USDT.
• Companies pay too. Wallets our labels attribute to exchanges sent 665 of these transfers, 7.5M USDT.

How to avoid it

Check the recipient right before you send. On TRON, isBlackListed(address) on the USDT contract (TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t) answers in one call. Re-check addresses you pay regularly: a frozen counterparty looks exactly the same in your address book. For payouts and withdrawals, check at signing time, not when the address was added.

If you'd rather not call the contract yourself, @freezecheck_bot shows whether an address is frozen and where its money came from.

Data

All 3,030 transfers (time, block, sender, frozen address, amount, minutes after the freeze, current status) are open under CC BY 4.0: CSV, Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.24222534, Kaggle. Method and caveats are on the study page.

FreezeCheck checks a TRON USDT wallet before a deal: @freezecheck_bot. Full study, method and CSV: freezecheck.org.