Bank of Thailand targets USDT in gray money crackdown
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- Bank of Thailand is partnering with Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission to audit high-volume stablecoin transactions focused on USDT, cash, and currency exchanges to identify illicit financial flows.
- Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said the measures are "not short-term fixes" and require "continuous deployment of multiple parallel strategies," per local outlet The Nation.
- Thailand's gray economy crackdown responds to staggering scam losses of 115 billion THB ($3.4 billion) in 2025 and roughly 173 million scam calls and texts recorded.
- Commercial banks face expanded compliance duties across cash networks, currency exchanges, gold bullion trading, and suspicious stablecoin transactions; cash deposits over 5 million baht ($150,000) require full source-of-funds disclosure.
- Thailand's crypto market remains active despite stablecoin payments being outlawed by the central bank — exchange Bitkub handles about $26 million in daily volume, with ~40% in forex and USDT/THB as the top pair.
- The 2025 bank crackdown went sideways: Thai banks froze three million accounts to combat mule accounts and gray capital, but media reports described the dragnet as a "scammer crackdown gone wrong" that swept up legitimate businesses.
- Thai crypto platforms separately froze 10,000 accounts in a related AML crackdown, per earlier reports.
Why it matters: Thailand's BoT is essentially conceding that its prior blunt-force approach — freezing three million bank accounts in 2025 and catching innocent businesses in the net — wasn't working, and is now pivoting to precision surveillance of USDT flows and high-value cash where the gray money actually moves. For crypto users and exchanges in Thailand, this means stablecoin transactions above undisclosed thresholds become reportable events; for scam operators, the cost of cashing out just got significantly higher.
