Senate Democrats put Tether’s USDT under the microscope over Iran sanctions evasion

Senate Democrats have a new report, and Tether is the main character. On September 28, 2026, minority staff on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a document arguing that USDT has become a core tool of Iran’s sanctions-evasion machinery. The report is titled ‘Tethered to Terrorism: Crypto & Iran’s Shadow Banking Network.’ The findings arrive amid existing tensions between the US and Iran. They also come with a request for federal follow-up, which turns the report from a policy paper into something closer to a warning shot. What the report found The 28-page document examined 846 crypto wallets. All of them had been sanctioned or targeted for seizure by one of two bodies between June 2021 and August 2026. The first is the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, better known as OFAC. The second is Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing. The headline number: 84% of the sanctioned wallets tied to Iran and its affiliated proxies transacted primarily in USDT. The breakdown gets more pointed when split by designating authority. According to the report, 87% of the 757 wallets flagged by Israel transacted mainly in USDT. Among the 101 walle...