Public Ledgers Let Crypto Seizures Hit 11% in 2025

About 11% of illicit crypto volume was seized in 2025, Binance Research said, a rate the firm called 55 times the recovery rate for fiat. The tally came from public actions by Tether, Interpol, the T3 Financial Crime Unit, and others, not from one agency’s books.

The same open ledger that produced that rate also left more than $75 billion in flagged coins sitting on-chain, up 28% from 2024, because less of it is being laundered out.

Binance Research Puts 2025 Seizures at 11%

Binance Research, the exchange’s research arm, posted the 2025 ratio on May 16, 2026. “Crypto is not a safe haven for illicit finance,” the account wrote, then added that crypto crime is not solved, but the idea that crypto is uniquely hospitable to illicit activity is increasingly a myth.

Crypto is not a safe haven for illicit finance.

📊 ~11% of illicit crypto volume was seized in 2025 – 55x the recovery rate for fiat.

That figure comes from publicly reported actions by Tether, Interpol, the T3 Financial Crime Unit, and others — not a single agency estimate.… pic.twitter.com/ng91ZmEGQi

— Binance Research (@BinanceResearch) May 16, 2026

The firm did not publish a single dollar total for coins taken. It bundled court seizures, issuer freezes, and recovered stolen funds into one rate and set that rate against a cash baseline that has barely moved in a decade. SlowMist and PeckShield, two blockchain security firms, separately tracked 8.3% to 13.2% of stolen funds recovered or frozen in 2025, a range Binance Research cited as a check on the midpoint.

PeckShield logged $4.04 billion in theft and fraud losses and $334.9 million recovered or frozen, which is 8.3% of that pool. SlowMist counted about 200 incidents and $2.935 billion in losses, with about $387 million returned or frozen, 13.2% of its 2025 total. Those are different nets. PeckShield folds in more fraud. SlowMist’s 13.2% sits on a tighter incident list whose losses still rose 46% from $2.013 billion in 2024, even as the incident count fell from 410.

A Fiat Recovery Rate Under 1%

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in its 2011 study of illicit financial flows, wrote that less than 1% of global illicit flows are seized and frozen. In the same report it put a finer working figure at around 0.2% of crime proceeds laundered through the financial system. Eleven divided by 0.2 is 55. That is the multiple Binance Research is using, not 11 divided by 1.

CRYPTO VERSUS CASH RECOVERY

Cash still wins on volume of crime and loses on recovery. UNODC put criminal proceeds in 2009 at about $2.1 trillion and funds available for laundering at about $1.6 trillion. Interpol and later FATF briefings have kept repeating a recovery share around 1%. Crypto’s 11% looks large only because that cash denominator is so small.

127,271 Bitcoin Came From One Case

Binance Research itself warned that one file can move the headline. On October 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment of Chen Zhi, also known as Vincent, the 37-year-old founder and chairman of Prince Holding Group, a Cambodian conglomerate. Prosecutors charged wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy over forced-labor scam compounds that ran cryptocurrency investment fraud, the pattern known as pig butchering.

The same day, prosecutors filed a civil forfeiture complaint against about 127,271 Bitcoin, then worth about $15 billion, held in unhosted wallets whose private keys they said Chen possessed. The department called it the largest forfeiture action in Department history. The coins were already in U.S. custody when the complaint was filed.

THE PRINCE GROUP BITCOIN FILE

1. About 2015: Chen founds Prince Group, which prosecutors say grew into a criminal enterprise across more than 30 countries while posing as a real-estate and finance conglomerate.
2. October 14, 2025: Brooklyn prosecutors unseal the indictment and seek forfeiture of 127,271 Bitcoin, about $15 billion, the largest such action in Justice Department history.
3. October 14, 2025: Treasury designates Prince Group a transnational criminal organization; the United Kingdom announces parallel sanctions.
4. January 2026: Cambodian authorities detain Chen Zhi and transfer him toward Chinese custody, according to official statements from Phnom Penh after a December 2025 decree stripped his Cambodian citizenship.

The complaint describes “spraying” and “funneling,” splitting large sums across scores of addresses and then packing them back together. That is the public ledger doing what cash cannot: keep a map of the hops. It is also why one seized stash can dominate a yearly rate. Strip out the Prince Group coins, Binance Research said, and the remaining 2025 crypto seizures still run at about 10 times the fiat baseline. The caveat is the point. A single unhosted bitcoin hoard did a lot of the 11% work.

Most of the Flagged Coins Never Left the Chain

Two days before the 11% post, Binance Research published a companion thread on Chainalysis data current as of May 13, 2026. More than $75 billion in illicit crypto remained on-chain. The stock has grown every year since 2016 and rose another 28% in 2025, the firm said, because less of it is successfully laundered.

THE STRANDED STOCKPILE

• On-chain stock: More than $75 billion in illicit crypto still visible on public ledgers as of mid-May 2026.
• Yearly change: Up 28% in 2025 versus 2024, which Binance Research read as a laundering failure, not a crime boom by itself.
• Downstream wallets: More than 80% of those funds no longer sit at the original crime address; they have moved one or two hops, and the ledger still lists every hop.
• Share of traffic: Illicit transfers stay under 1% of total on-chain volume even as the stranded dollar figure climbs.

Seizing 11% and trapping more than $75 billion are the same design, viewed from two ends. A transfer that cannot be erased can be frozen, forfeited, or simply stuck. Mixers and over-the-counter desks still exist, but they do not swallow a stockpile that large without leaving a trail that analytics firms already follow.

Tether, Interpol, and the 24-Hour Freeze

A large share of the 11% is not a judge signing a forfeiture order. It is an issuer pressing a blacklist. Tether, TRON, and TRM Labs launched the T3 Financial Crime Unit in September 2024 to coordinate freezes of USDT on TRON with police. On May 14, 2026, the unit said it had frozen over USD 450 million in illicit assets since launch, intercepting 43.9% more illicit proceeds in 2025 than the year before, across 23 jurisdictions.

This $450 million milestone is just the beginning of what T3 is capable of, as its impact will only continue to grow in scale and importance.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, May 14, 2026 statement

Tether said FATF’s asset-recovery guidance had already flagged T3, alongside TRM’s Beacon Network, as a public-private model, and quoted FATF calling the unit an invaluable resource for law enforcement. Freezes can land within 24 hours on account-takeover and violent-crime cases. The unit also backed Brazil’s Operation Lusocoin, which froze more than 3 billion reais in crypto, including 4.3 million USDT.

THE FREEZE STACK BEHIND THE 11%

• T3 since 2024: More than $450 million frozen on TRON USDT, with 43.9% more intercepts in 2025 than the prior year.
• Speed: Asset freezes inside 24 hours on multiple emergency requests, a step no cash courier can match.
• Lusocoin: Brazilian federal police froze more than 3 billion reais, including 4.3 million USDT tied to the network.
• Xinbi, September 2026: The Justice Department credited Tether after restraining more than $52 million in a one-day action.

On September 11, 2026, Tether said the department’s Scam Center Strike Force thanked it for help against Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language Telegram marketplace that prosecutors say connected scam compounds with laundering vendors. Authorities seized two wallets holding about $12 million in vendor payments and moved to restrain 47 more, a package Tether described as more than $52 million in cryptocurrency restrained in a single day.

That issuer-level freeze is the same lever already visible in how stablecoin enforcers freeze illicit funds. Bitcoin in an unhosted wallet still needs keys, a warrant, or an exchange. USDT can be frozen by the company that issued it. Binance Research folded both machines into one 11% print. The ratio looks like better policing. A chunk of it is a kill switch on the most used dollar coin, and TRON still hosted more than $88 billion of that coin as of May 2026.

Illicit Inflows Still Reached $158 Billion

A higher seizure rate did not shrink the illicit pile. TRM Labs, which sits inside T3, put incoming value to illicit wallets at USD 158 billion in illicit crypto flows in 2025, up nearly 145% from $64.5 billion in 2024, the highest in five years. As a share of attributed volume, the same flows fell to 1.2% from 1.3% in 2024 and 2.4% in 2023. The dollars rose. The slice of traffic shrank.

Chainalysis, in its 2026 crime-report introduction, put receipts at illicit addresses at at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% jump from a revised $57.2 billion in 2024, and said stablecoins made up 84% of illicit volume. North Korea-linked hackers stole $2 billion, including nearly $1.5 billion from the February 2025 Bybit exploit. Those two firms do not share a ledger. Treat $158 billion and $154 billion as separate lower bounds, not a blended average.

TWO TALLIES OF 2025 ILLICIT CRYPTO

TRM said a few large shocks did most of the lift: sanctions-linked flows up more than 400%, including the ruble-pegged A7A5 token, plus a 31% rise in hacked or stolen funds and a 32% rise in blocklisted activity. Chinese-language escrow and underground banking networks, in TRM’s count, processed over $103 billion in 2025, up from about $123 million in 2020. Scam compounds and sanctioned states followed the same rails that T3 now freezes. Liquidity pulled them in. The freeze button is what they did not price.

How Stolen Crypto Gets Frozen Faster Than Cash

Cash leaves no public hop list. A dollar in a suitcase does not ping an analytics firm, and a bank freeze still needs an account the bank controls. Crypto splits into two recovery paths that Binance Research added together. On bitcoin and other unhosted coins, investigators follow the chain, wait for a cash-out, or take the keys, as they did with Chen Zhi’s 127,271 Bitcoin. On USDT, Tether can blacklist an address in hours if police ask, which is why T3’s 24-hour cases exist at all.

That is the irony the 11% figure buries. The marketing was unstoppable peer-to-peer money. The working system is a public log plus a centralized dollar coin whose issuer now works with police in 23 countries. About 89% of illicit volume still was not seized in 2025. The rest is either stranded in those $75 billion of marked wallets or already one hop further on, still visible. On September 11, 2026, the same freeze authority took another $52 million off Xinbi Guarantee wallets in a day, four months after Binance Research declared the crime-haven story a myth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Does Binance Research Say 11% Is 55 Times the Cash Rate?

UNODC’s 2011 study used two figures in one document: a public line of less than 1% of illicit flows seized and frozen, and an inner working figure of around 0.2% of laundered crime proceeds. Binance Research’s 55 times multiple is 11 divided by 0.2, not 11 divided by 1. The same study estimated about $1.6 trillion was available for laundering in 2009, or 2.7% of world GDP that year, which is the cash pile that 0.2% was measured against.

Were the Prince Group Coins Already in U.S. Hands?

Yes. The October 14, 2025 complaint targeted about 127,271 Bitcoin that prosecutors said already sat in U.S. government custody, taken from unhosted wallets whose private keys Chen Zhi had held. If convicted on the wire-fraud and money-laundering conspiracy counts, he faces a maximum of 40 years in prison. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report, cited in the same release, put reported cryptocurrency investment-fraud losses at more than $5.8 billion that year.

What Is the T3 Financial Crime Unit?

T3 is a joint unit Tether, TRON, and TRM Labs started in September 2024 to flag illicit USDT on TRON and freeze it when police request. It works with agencies in 23 jurisdictions on five continents and says it can freeze funds within 24 hours in emergencies, including account takeovers, kidnappings, and extortion. Its 2025 case mix, per the May 14, 2026 note, included banned substances, exchange hacks, DPRK-linked activity, terrorist financing, and so-called wrench attacks.

Why Do SlowMist and PeckShield Publish Different Recovery Rates?

They are not counting the same incidents. SlowMist’s 13.2% is about $387 million recovered or frozen against $2.935 billion in losses across about 200 verified 2025 security incidents. PeckShield’s 8.3% is $334.9 million against $4.04 billion that includes $2.67 billion in hacks and $1.37 billion in fraud. SlowMist also logged Tether freezing USDT-ERC20 on 576 Ethereum addresses in 2025 and Circle freezing USDC-ERC20 on 214 addresses, a chain-specific freeze count that does not appear in PeckShield’s dollar recovery total.

Did Recovery Stay Near 11% After 2025?

Binance Research has not published a 2026 full-year seizure rate. SlowMist’s mid-year 2026 security report put recovery or freezing at 12.3% in the first half, about $118 million out of about $956 million in losses across 182 incidents, close to its 2025 full-year 13.2% on a smaller dollar base. That is a stolen-funds snapshot, not a repeat of the 11% illicit-volume ratio, and it can move when the rest of 2026 is counted.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of published research, court filings, and company statements. It is for information only and is not investment, legal, or tax advice, and it is not a guide to recovering stolen crypto or to judging any defendant’s guilt. Readers who hold digital assets, face a theft, or need to interpret a freeze or forfeiture should consult a licensed attorney and, where money is at stake, a qualified financial adviser. Figures and case statuses reflect the cited filings and statements as of the dates given in the piece and can change as investigations, prices, and recovery totals are updated.