Bank of Thailand targets USDT and cash flows in gray money crackdown

Thailand has been plagued by Chinese-affiliated scam centers, with illicit gains flowing through a “gray money” economy.

Cointelegraph by Martin Young · 13 Jul 2026 · 4 min read

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Written by Martin Youngstaff writerReviewed by Felix Ngstaff editorWritten by Martin Youngstaff writerReviewed by Felix Ngstaff editorBank of Thailand targets USDT and cash flows in gray money crackdownLatest NewsPublishedJul 13, 2026<!–>

Thailand has been plagued by Chinese-affiliated scam centers, with illicit gains flowing through a “gray money” economy.

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Thailand’s central bank is stepping up stablecoin surveillance as part of a wider effort to crack down on money laundering, illicit finance and “gray money” in the country.

The Bank of Thailand is working with the Kingdom’s Securities and Exchange Commission to audit high-volume stablecoin transactions, with a focus on USDt (USDT), cash transactions and currency exchanges, to identify and stop illicit financial flows.

“The measures we are implementing are not short-term fixes; they require the continuous deployment of multiple parallel strategies,” Bank of Thailand Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said, according to local media outlet The Nation on Saturday.

Thailand is targeting the “gray economy,” which largely consists of cash that may have come from suspicious origins, such as scam call centers that have proliferated in the region. While there are no reliable figures for the gray economy, 2025 scam losses may have amounted to $3.4 billion, amid 173 million scam calls and texts.

Stablecoins have become a popular method of transferring large amounts due to near-instant cross-border settlement.

Cash, forex and gold trading targeted

The move will expand commercial bank compliance duties across cash networks, currency exchanges, gold bullion trading and “suspicious stablecoin transactions” in an effort to prevent regulated entities from facilitating corruption or shadow economies, it reported.

High-value cash transactions will also require a source-of-funds declaration, and exchanges of large volumes of big banknotes for smaller denominations without a clear business reason will also be monitored. Cash deposits of more than 5 million baht ($150,000) also require full disclosure.

Thailand has often been touted as a crypto haven, but digital asset and stablecoin payments are still outlawed by the central bank and there has been regular rule tightening on crypto businesses.

Crypto trading remains legal, with the country’s largest exchange, Bitkub, seeing about $26 million in daily volume. However, almost 40% of that is forex, with the USDT/THB pair being the most popular, according to CoinGecko.

Scammer crackdown gone wrong

Thailand’s banks imposed sweeping account restrictions and froze three million bank accounts in 2025 as part of its crackdown on mule accounts, gray capital and suspicious activity.

However, thousands of individuals and legitimate businesses were caught in the dragnet in what media reports described at the time as a “scammer crackdown gone wrong.”

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