Tether’s suspected ties to bank fraud are under a more powerful microscope as America’s top financial cops take over a stalled investigation of the world’s largest stablecoin by market cap.
This week, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has assigned U.S. Attorney Damian Williams to kickstart the Department of Justice’s ongoing probe into whether Tether’s parent company iFinex committed bank fraud while it was getting its USDT stablecoin off the ground.
In July 2021, Bloomberg reported that the DoJ was investigating whether Tether executives “concealed from banks that transactions were linked to crypto” during its early years. From its inception, Tether struggled to convince banks to enter into or sustain business relationships, as detailed in the $18.5 million settlement Tether and its affiliated cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex reached in 2021 with the New York Attorney General (NYAG).
The SDNY are the unquestioned leaders in probing financial malfeasance and, as far as law enforcement goes, Williams is a crypto veteran. Williams has played significant roles in investigating money laundering by senior executives at Bitmex, insider trading at the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) exchange and NFT marketplace OpenSea, as well as crypto tax cheats and numerous other crypto-related shenanigans.
Predictably, Tether released a blog post accusing Bloomberg of being “desperate for attention in an industry that…
