Washington Slaps Sanctions on 19 Entities as $16.6B in US Losses Ramp Up Pressure
Geopolitical tensions hit fever pitch as Washington unleashes fresh sanctions against 19 entities—adding fuel to an already volatile financial landscape.
The $16.6B Question
Massive losses on the US side are turning up the heat, forcing regulators and market players into a corner. Nobody’s blinking yet—but the pressure’s building.
Finance, as usual, remains beautifully unbothered—printing fees while Main Street picks up the tab.
Stablecoins and crime
On the digital rails, stablecoins remain central to scam cash-outs and laundering. The Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime Report documents the migration of illicit settlement to dollar-pegged tokens, while TRM Labs’ analysis details pig-butchering rings’ preference for USDT on TRON because of speed and cost, and shows recent U.S. actions tied to these flows.
Industry collaboration has accelerated: the Tether-TRON-TRM “T3” initiative has evolved into T3+, which TRM says has helped freeze more than $250 million in illicit assets since late 2024, with Binance joining the expanded program in August 2025.
Empirical work on past sanctions offers a guide to possible outcomes. A New York Fed staff report on the 2022 designation of Tornado Cash found an immediate and lasting drop in usage and user diversity following the OFAC action, consistent with compliance filters at Core infrastructure. Over time, some net flows recovered, indicating partial adaptation outside the U.S. jurisdiction.
That pattern implies compounding effects when designations coincide with exchange, issuer, and on-chain service enforcement, and weaker effects when enforcement gaps or extraterritorial limits persist.
Washington has also moved upstream to chokepoints in the scam economy’s financial plumbing. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed a finding that Cambodia-based Huione Group is a primary money laundering concern under Section 311, paired with a special measures proposal to restrict U.S. financial access.
If finalized, those measures WOULD force additional Know-Your-Customer and transaction-monitoring steps for banks and processors handling payments linked to the network, adding friction to fiat on, and off-ramps even where crypto addresses rotate.
Risk and screening
Risk-control priorities now shift to screening counterparties named in the latest designations and to tracing proximity exposure. Compliance teams should re-run SDN screening and ownership look-throughs under the 50 Percent Rule, cross-check any overlapping vendor or PSP relationships in Cambodia and Myanmar, and test on-chain address filters used for USDT redemptions and exchange deposits.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $16.6 billion in reported cyber-enabled losses for 2024, with investment and romance frauds among the largest categories, reinforcing the potential size of U.S.-exposed flows that sanctions aim to disrupt.
Globally, regulators continue to tighten platform obligations. Singapore issued its first enforcement order under the Online Criminal Harms Act, directing Meta to add anti-scam controls or face penalties, per Reuters.
That posture, combined with FATF’s call for enhanced due diligence on Myanmar, raises the compliance bar for advertisers, payments, and messaging tools that intersect with scam recruitment and mule networks.
Near-term scenarios range from rapid de-risking by exchanges and stablecoin issuers that constrain redemptions tied to the named entities, to partial displacement into lesser-regulated venues and alt-rails with slower settlement.
Enforcement intensity at fiat off-ramps, Section 311 outcomes on enablers, and regional utility restrictions will determine how much value the compounds can extract.
Today’s designations place Myanmar’s Shwe Kokko-linked networks and their Cambodian counterparts under tighter scrutiny, and push more intermediary risk from on-chain services to off-chain firms with exposure to these nodes.
