Tether building the financial component of the surveillance state…

How the government is using Tether to build the financial component of the surveillance state.

Two guys in Bangkok ran a gaming promotion business that was legal, and licensed. They arranged VIP experiences, travel, lodging, meals, for high-roller clients at casinos operated by… pic.twitter.com/78DhZkAEAf

— theleahfiles (@leahfiles) September 10, 2026

How the government is using Tether to build the financial component of the surveillance state.

Two guys in Bangkok ran a gaming promotion business that was legal, and licensed. They arranged VIP experiences, travel, lodging, meals, for high-roller clients at casinos operated by a publicly traded US company in Asia. The casino did KYC on them and on their customers. They independently screened every crypto wallet that touched their business. They were not hiding from anyone

On October 30, 2025, at 11 PM UTC, Tether blacklisted ten of their Ethereum wallets in a two-and-a-half-minute batch. $42,417,785.62 frozen. The largest wallet alone held $26.1 million. One of the men, Natthawat Kasamvilas, contacted Tether to find out what happened. On November 2nd Tether emailed him back, gave him the name of a Homeland Security Investigations agent, and said “We do not have further information at this time.” They did not mention that they were the ones who froze the money

Here is what actually happened. An HSI agent out of Raleigh, North Carolina got a tip from a victim, one person, identified in court documents only as “GM”, who lost roughly $30,000 in a romance scam. HSI traced GM’s $30,000 to a consolidation wallet, then identified 18 wallets belonging to Thai nationals, then traced forward to 11 more wallets connected to two of those Thai nationals. None of those 11 wallets belonged to Kasamvilas or his business partner Nutthawat Rukthammachalern. The affidavit does not trace a single dollar from the scam victim to their wallets. The tracing exhibits the government submitted were, according to their lawyers, “so blurry and illegible that it is impossible to meaningfully review or decipher” them. When clearer copies were requested, key portions were still unreadable

But none of that mattered, because before any of that paperwork existed, before any judge reviewed any evidence, a Homeland Security agent called Tether and asked them to freeze the wallets. He did not have a warrant or a court order or a subpoena. Just a request. And Tether did it

They flew to the United States. On May 21, 2026, they sat down with HSI officials in person, brought lawyers, presented evidence that the government’s own affidavit had no tracing connecting the scam to their wallets. HSI gave them no substantive answers and no path to get their money back

As of today, no indictment has been filed against them. No criminal charges. and no civil forfeiture complaint. The government has not accused them of a crime in any court. But their $42.4 million is still frozen. And the whole time it has been frozen, Tether has been earning Treasury yield on the reserves backing those tokens. The company that locked their money is profiting from locking their money and not giving it back.

Kasamvilas and Rukthammachalern had no account with Tether. They bought their USDT on the open market, the same way 650 million other people use it. And Tether froze it anyway because it has a function built into its smart contract called addBlackList that lets the company unilaterally lock any wallet on earth with no judge, no hearing, just a line of code

They filed a motion in North Carolina on July 31st demanding the government return their funds. Then on August 31st they sued Tether in the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit says what happened to them is conversion, trespass, and unjust enrichment. Tether called the case “baseless” and said it was interfering with their “important work with global law enforcement”

So, a private company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, now operating out of El Salvador, froze $42.4 million belonging to two foreign nationals based on a phone call from one US federal agent investigating a $30,000 scam. No charges filed to this day. And when they sued, the company said helping law enforcement freeze people’s money without legal process is “important work”.

That is not how the law works when the government freezes your bank account. They need a judge. They need probable cause. They need the 4th Amendment. But Tether is not the government, and that is the point.

They already did this with physical surveillance. Flock Safety has 120,000 cameras across 49 states tracking every car that passes, make, model, color, scratches, passengers, pedestrians. Police departments buy access, and CBP taps in, no warrant needed because it is a private company selling a service. Axon has 85 percent of the body camera market and built a platform that merges CCTV, drones, license plate readers, gunshot detection, and AI analytics into what they call a “single pane of glass.” Palantir combined financial transactions, communications, travel records, and criminal databases into one system and sold it to the CIA, ICE, the Pentagon, and local police. The FBI uses it for “complete target analysis of known populations”

The 4th Amendment says the government cannot search you without a warrant. But if a private company collects the data and the government buys access to it, or just asks nicely, that protection disappears. A bipartisan group in Congress called it a loophole and introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act. It has not passed, of course.

Now they are doing the same thing with our money.

If the government wanted to monitor every financial transaction in America, it would need legislation, judicial oversight, probably a Supreme Court fight. It would take years and it might fail. But if a private company issues a digital currency that 650 million people use, monitors every transaction through the FBI’s own surveillance contractor, and freezes wallets on a phone call, well the government gets the same result without any of the legal burden.

Here is what you would need to build a privatized financial surveillance network and what Tether has already done.

(1) You would need a currency people are forced into.
So you ban the government from making its own digital dollar…done, January 2025 executive order. Then you pass a law making private stablecoins the only legal option…done, GENIUS Act. You crash the real dollar with tariffs so people worldwide switch to the digital one…happening right now. Tether is at 650 million users and adding 30 million wallets a quarter.

(2) You would need to see every transaction.
Tether partnered with Chainalysis, the same surveillance firm the FBI and Secret Service use to track money. Every USDT transaction on every blockchain is monitored in real time

(3) You would need identity resolution.
The GENIUS Act classifies stablecoins as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act. KYC requirements, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting. FinCEN published the compliance rules in June 2026. Every user becomes identifiable.

4) You would need the power to freeze and seize without going through a judge.
Tether has frozen $4.4 billion across thousands of wallets. They work with 310 law enforcement agencies in 64 countries. They froze $42.4 million on a verbal request from one agent.

(5) You would need physical surveillance to pair with financial surveillance, because money tells you what someone bought but not where they are.
Tether invested in Satellogic, a satellite company building daily coverage of the entire planet by 2027. The tech partner is Palantir, the AI runs on the satellites. The capability is called “pattern of life assessment.”

(6) You would need computing power to process it all.
Tether owns 22,000 Nvidia GPUs through the Rumble-Northern Data merger. $150 million committed for GPU access.

(7) You would need media control in case anyone starts reporting on it.
Tether owns 48 percent of Rumble and signed a $100 million advertising deal.

(8) And you would need the regulators to protect you instead of investigating you.
The Commerce Secretary’s family firm custodies Tether’s reserves and owns 5% of it. The former Treasury Secretary chairs the satellite company. The White House crypto czar wrote the law and became Tether’s CEO one month later. And the Corporate Transparency Act, the one law that required shell companies to disclose who owns them, got deleted.

That is every piece all in place. Hard to ignore. All owned by one company that has never been audited, is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, and is run by four men, two who just moved to El Salvador with 15 shell companies and no extradition treaty.

The 4th Amendment was written to stop the government from doing this. It does not apply to Tether and that is their plan, I think. They are privatizing the surveillance apparatus and Tether looks like the financial component.