A deposit that leaves MEXC and comes back frozen
You moved USDT through MEXC, and now the balance shows as frozen. If the freeze is on-chain, Tether placed it: the company behind USDT calls its own token contract and adds the address to a blacklist it controls. We have tracked that action since 2026-07-14 on the USDT freeze tracker. Our evidence covers what the issuer does once it acts on an address. It does not cover what an individual exchange's risk control flags, or why.
1,315 wallets flagged, 1,308 confirmed frozen
Since 2026-07-14, we have flagged 1,315 wallets as stablecoin freeze targets before the issuer acted on them. Of the 1,314 flagged wallets with a known outcome, 1,308 were frozen, a 99.5% hit rate. Each flag is built from Tether's own freeze proposals (explained below), so the hit rate measures how reliably the issuer's process ends in a freeze, whichever exchange the wallet last touched.
Between them, the wallets we flagged before the freeze held $547.2 million at the moment it landed. That is the balance sitting on addresses the issuer was about to lock. It does not count money lost to a hack or a scam.
Half of the flagged wallets were frozen within 6 minutes of our flag: that is the median gap between TrustSniffer flagging a wallet and the issuer freezing it. Nine in ten were frozen within 2.9 hours (the 90th percentile gap), and the remaining tenth took longer.
TRON freezes in 5 minutes, Ethereum in 33
On both networks a Tether freeze starts as a proposal on a multisig wallet, which several of Tether's keyholders must approve before it executes. We flag the address when the proposal appears, and the head start is the time from our flag to the executed freeze. Proposals clear fast on TRON and take longer to confirm on Ethereum:
- TRON: 1,187 freezes flagged in advance from Tether's multisig proposals, with a median head start of 5 minutes.
- Ethereum: 117 freezes flagged the same way, with a median head start of 33 minutes.
- Cross-chain twins: 4 wallets flagged as the twin of a key the issuer had just frozen on another network, then frozen themselves.
Checking the contract before you assume a freeze
You can run the same kind of check without any of TrustSniffer's tools, in four steps.
- Open Tronscan or Etherscan, matching whichever network the deposit moved on, and search the address that sent or received the USDT. Both explorers show the sender, the recipient, the token contract, the amount and the time of the transfer.
- Compare the token contract on that transfer against Tether's own contracts: TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t on TRON and 0xdAC17F958D2ee523a2206206994597C13D831ec7 on Ethereum. A balance called USDT from any other contract is not Tether's USDT.
- Check the address's current balance on the same page. An ERC-20 or TRC-20 balance is one number per address; a new deposit adds to whatever was already there, it is not held apart from older funds.
- If the contract matches and the address turns up on the freeze tracker, the freeze is the issuer's action, not the exchange's. The wallet checker shows whether TrustSniffer has already flagged that address.
Why the freeze tracker cannot warn you in advance
That head start stays with us. TrustSniffer publishes a pending freeze proposal without its exact address or amount until the freeze executes, so the tracker explains a freeze after it happens and cannot warn a holder in time to move funds. To check your own case, open the address on Tronscan or Etherscan and look in its transfer history for a blacklist action from Tether's contract. If you find one and the address is on the freeze tracker, the freeze is real and the decision to release it is Tether's; the record does not tell you whether or when the balance comes back. If the explorer shows no issuer action and the funds still look stuck, take the question to MEXC support, because the exchange's account page alone will not show which party is holding the funds.
