Only the issuer can flip this switch
A wallet holding USDT doesn't get frozen because a police officer flags it. The only party that can move an address from able-to-transact to blocked is the token's issuer, Tether, and it does that through its own proposal process on the TRON and Ethereum networks.
The question comes up when a deposit will not move, a balance looks fine but will not send, or a headline reports a crypto seizure. In every case we can measure, the party that locked the funds was the issuer. No police department reaches directly into the chain.
1,009 of 1,014 flagged wallets were frozen
We are TrustSniffer, and a flag means we recorded one of Tether's multisig proposals the moment it appeared and followed it until the freeze executed. Since 14 July 2026 we have flagged 1,015 wallets this way. Of the 1,014 where we know the outcome, 1,009 were frozen by the issuer, which is 99.5%. The remaining wallet has no recorded outcome yet. The full record is on our live USDT freeze tracker.
The two networks move at different speeds. On TRON, 923 of the freezes we flagged followed Tether's multisig proposals, with a median gap of 5 minutes between proposal and freeze. On Ethereum, 82 freezes followed the same pattern with a median gap of 33 minutes. Across both networks combined, the median gap from flag to freeze was 8 minutes, and 90% of flagged wallets were frozen within 3.2 hours. Between them, the wallets we flagged before they were frozen held $427.7 million at the time of the freeze.
Four wallets frozen through a twin key
Four wallets never appeared in a proposal of their own. One private key can control an address on TRON and an address on Ethereum at the same time. In each of these four cases the issuer froze one of those addresses, and the address on the other network, controlled by the same key, was frozen with it. An owner who reuses one key across networks takes on that risk even though no proposal ever named the second address.
Checking an address on Tronscan or Etherscan
You don't need to wait for a flag to check a specific wallet. Both networks have public explorers that show every transfer an address has made, and the official USDT contract is public too.
If the contract matches Tether's official address, the balance is real USDT and the issuer is the only party that can freeze it. The explorer tells you what moved in and out of the address. Whether the issuer has frozen that address is a separate question, and that is what our tracker records. If the contract does not match, the balance was never USDT, and nothing Tether does with its own token affects it.
- Confirm the contract. Genuine USDT uses the contract TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t on TRON and 0xdAC17F958D2ee523a2206206994597C13D831ec7 on Ethereum. A token calling itself USDT from any other contract isn't Tether's USDT, whatever a wallet app displays.
- Open the address on Tronscan for TRON or Etherscan for Ethereum. Searching an address or a transaction hash shows the sender, the recipient, the token contract, the amount and the time of each transfer.
- A deposit does not sit apart from the rest of a balance. Both ERC-20 and TRC-20 tokens keep one balance per address, so a transfer in adds straight to whatever was already there. A freeze applies to the address, so it blocks that whole balance, including funds that arrived before the suspicious deposit.
- Check the address against our wallet checker. It reports signals tied to that specific wallet, separate from the token it holds. A hit there is a reason to hold off before sending anything more to that address.
What the freeze tracker can't tell you
Our freeze tracker is built from Tether's own multisig proposals, so it only shows what the issuer does on-chain: a proposal, then a freeze. Proposals that are still pending are published without the address or the exact amount until the freeze executes, so the record never gives a holder advance warning in time to move funds. If a wallet isn't already frozen, nothing in this data says whether it's about to be.
