Thailand's Central Bank Takes Its Grey-Economy Glasses to USDT 🕵️‍♂️

The Bank of Thailand is deploying data-analytics tools to scan high-volume stablecoin trades, focusing on Tether's USDT, as part of a widening crackdown on illicit finance, money laundering and what Thai officials call the "grey economy." Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said the central bank has begun screening abnormally large USDT transactions and has already flagged some that appear designed to sidestep disclosure requirements or move funds outside normal banking channels, according to Thai outlet Thansettakij. Because the Securities and Exchange Commission directly regulates digital assets in Thailand, the Bank of Thailand is coordinating with the SEC, which holds the authority to act on the findings. USDT is the largest stablecoin and the most widely used trading pair on crypto exchanges, according to CoinGecko data.

"The measures we are implementing are not short-term fixes; they require the continuous deployment of multiple parallel strategies," Ratanakorn said, according to local media outlet The Nation. The move expands compliance duties across commercial bank networks, currency exchanges, gold bullion trading and "suspicious stablecoin transactions." High-value cash transactions will require a source-of-funds declaration, exchanges of large volumes of big banknotes for smaller denominations without a clear business reason will be monitored, and cash deposits of more than 5 million baht ($150,000) must carry full disclosure. Since April, banks have had to check the purpose of cash withdrawals of 5 million baht or more, a rule the central bank says cut large cash withdrawals by roughly 35%, and from the fourth quarter, depositors bringing in 5 million baht or more in cash may have to declare where it came from. Monthly gold withdrawals have fallen from about 4,000 kilograms to around 700, and regulators cited buyers ordering gold through an app in the morning and collecting it from shops in the afternoon as a pattern prompting scrutiny.

Thailand has often been touted as a crypto haven, but digital asset and stablecoin payments remain outlawed by the central bank even as crypto trading is legal. The country's largest exchange, Bitkub, sees about $26 million in daily volume, and almost 40% of that is forex, with the USDT/THB pair being the most popular, according to CoinGecko. Thai agencies have been chasing crypto-enabled crime aggressively: police recently traced a romance-scam laundering network in which a single wallet moved more than $122.5 million in 10 months through cross-chain swaps as part of Interpol's Operation First Light, investigators have widened a mining probe into a $300 million Chinese laundering network, and $8.6 million in illegal mining rigs powering scam compounds has been seized. Thailand's banks separately imposed sweeping account restrictions in 2025 and froze three million bank accounts in a crackdown on mule accounts and gray capital, a campaign media reports described as a "scammer crackdown gone wrong" after thousands of legitimate individuals and businesses were caught in the dragnet. Scam losses reached 115 billion THB ($3.4 billion) in 2025, with around 173 million scam calls and texts recorded, even as Thai crypto platforms have reportedly frozen roughly 10,000 accounts in a separate AML effort.