Recently, the police uncovered a shocking major case: a well-known restaurant business owner used a self-built third-party payment platform to launder money for Southeast Asian gambling groups. In just a few years, the amount laundered reached 25.9 billion yuan, with illegal gains exceeding 500 million yuan.

The core method of this case is not actually complicated—on the surface, they operated popular restaurants as a cover, but in reality, they set up so-called "transfer water rooms" in office buildings, specifically to assist gambling websites in Japan, India, and other regions in processing fund flows. They quickly transferred RMB, rupees, and yen from overseas gamblers into secondary accounts, using account splitting to conceal the true fund paths, mixed with stolen scam funds.

More importantly, to handle such a large volume of transactions without being detected, the group adopted a 24-hour three-shift operation mode, using the name of a tech company as a cover. But what is truly shocking is that—ultimately—they converted the laundered funds into USDT and other stablecoins through cryptocurrency dealers.

This case profoundly exposes a problem: when third-party payment platforms lack sufficient anti-money laundering scrutiny, combined with the cross-border flow characteristics of cryptocurrencies, it becomes a "perfect channel" in the eyes of criminals. Although USDT itself is a neutral tool, without KYC and AML procedures, it has indeed become the final link in money laundering. Authorities ultimately seized assets worth hundreds of millions, but this case also serves as a wake-up call for the entire payment and crypto industry—any weak link in risk control systems can be exploited.