1.47 million cash evaporated after being exchanged for USDT, two "currency exchange" couriers were sentenced.

[比推] Recently, there has been another money laundering case involving USDT in China, and the details are quite surreal.

In Taiyuan, Shanxi, there is a Ms. Zhang who met a person claiming to be “Lin Hao” on a short video app in May. This guy fabricated a story: he said his comrade works at a big company and can get internal stock information, guaranteeing a 5% profit each period. But there was a condition - transactions had to be made in USD, and cash had to be exchanged for USD with a “designated merchant” before being transferred to his comrade's USD account.

Ms. Zhang believed it. On May 21, she went to the hotel with 1.47 million in cash to exchange it. As a result, two runners—Chen and Li—came to meet her. The process was very strange: Ms. Zhang first sent the “USD account” given by Lin Hao to Chen, who then transferred it to the upper level. The upper level transferred 20,232.8 USDT to that account in three installments (which was equivalent to 1.47 million RMB at the time). Chen and Li took the cash and handed it over to the upper level, and the matter was considered settled.

But the money never reached Ms. Zhang's “investment account,” and Lin Hao went completely offline. By the time she realized and called the police, she discovered that the so-called “USD account” was actually just the fraud group's USDT wallet.

After the prosecutor intervened, they focused on key points: checking chat records to prove that these two knew the money was dirty; examining on-chain data to trace where the USDT ultimately went. The police transferred the case in August, and the review results were very clear—Chen and Li both admitted that “this large cash operation must have problems” and later received a bribe of 30,000. They helped complete the “RMB cash → USDT → cross-border transfer” operation, which is solid evidence of Money Laundering.

Final judgment: Chen was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, Li to one and a half years, and both were fined.

The trick of this case is actually not new - a combination of fake investment platforms and virtual currency Money Laundering. But the key point is that those intermediaries who help with “currency exchange”, even if they are just running errands, are still considered accomplices under the law. The prosecutor's office later issued a risk warning and worked with the anti-fraud center to conduct presentations, focusing specifically on this type of “investment schemes + cryptocurrencies” variant scam.

In the end, USDT and other stablecoins have long become hard currency for black and gray markets due to their fast cross-border transactions and difficulty to trace. If ordinary people come across “inside information”.