THE FEDS FROZE $938 MILLION — BECAUSE IT COULD BE FROZEN
The document is a Justice Department release dated September 9 from the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. In one day the Scam Center Strike Force seized the Telegram channels of Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language marketplace for scam services, took two wallets holding about $12 million, and restrained 47 more wallets holding over $52 million. The running total since the strike force launched in November 2025 is $938 million. Reported losses to these scams were $8.65 billion in 2025.
The same day Treasury designated Xinbi a transnational criminal organization. Its release: “Since its inception around 2022, Xinbi Guarantee’s marketplace has processed the equivalent of over $24 billion in digital assets and fiat currency through its marketplace.” Secretary Bessent: “Scam centers in Southeast Asia steal billions of dollars from American victims each year.”
Now the sentence in the DOJ release that carries the whole story: “The Strike Force thanks Tether for its proactive assistance in this investigation.”
Read that as a filing, not a slogan. A restrained wallet is a wallet whose contents cannot move. Neither release names the asset, but a stablecoin can be frozen by the company that issues it, in one call, and that is the assistance being thanked. The 47 wallets were restrained because what sat in them was a claim on an issuer, and the issuer answered the phone. That is the entire mechanism, and it is the same mechanism this desk wrote about this morning from the other side: a deposit is a claim, a stablecoin is a claim, and a claim can be stopped by whoever owes it.
Who profits: the victims, if any of the $938 million reaches them, which the release does not promise. What it costs: nothing to the honest holder today, and everything to the assumption that a token on a public chain is yours because the balance shows on your screen.
Bitcoin in your own custody has no issuer. There is no company for a strike force to thank, no address that can be restrained by a letter, no phone to answer. That is not a flaw the regulators missed. It is the property that makes the coin different from every other line on that screen, and it cuts both ways: it protects the honest holder and it gives the scammer nowhere to call either. The scam markets run on stablecoins for a reason, and so does the enforcement.
At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $77,188 at 10:51 AM ET on Crypto.com.