Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Newsmax's NPolicy Summit on Thursday that the government knows where the assets are and is "isolating them." He used the same billion-dollar figure in May, when he said the money had already been taken.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States will probably seize about $1 billion of cryptocurrency tied to Iran within the week. He made the remark on Thursday at Newsmax's NPolicy Summit in Washington, in an interview with Greta Van Susteren. "We're probably gonna seize a billion dollars of crypto this week," he said, and added, "We know where it is and we are isolating them."
The figure is one Bessent has used before, in a different tense. Speaking on Fox Business's "Kudlow" at the Reagan National Economic Forum on May 29, he said: "We have seized about a billion dollars of their crypto. Just outright grabbed the wallets." That account was in the past tense and described the assets as already taken. Thursday's was a forecast. Bessent did not identify the wallets behind the figure he gave this week, and he did not say whether the money is separate from what he described in May, according to The Block, which reported the remarks.
He placed the seizure inside a wider effort. "We did have a maximum pressure campaign. Now we have an absolute isolation campaign, and it's working," he said. The measures he described reach well beyond digital assets: blockades at the Strait of Hormuz, restrictions on international flights, and the closing of Iran's land routes with neighboring countries. Cryptopolitan, which also reported the appearance, said he described the government as already knowing where the assets are held and able to move on them inside a week.
Seizing and freezing are not the same outcome, and most of this year's announced actions against Iran-linked crypto have immobilized assets rather than transferred them. When Tether blacklists an address, the tokens stay where they are and simply stop moving, and it is the issuer, acting on the government's designation, that holds the switch. Bessent's May phrasing pointed at something else. Grabbing a wallet means obtaining the asset, not immobilizing it in place.
Tether keeps appearing in these actions because the Iran-linked flows that investigators describe run heavily through its token. Cryptopolitan, citing a review by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, reported that 84% of 846 wallets identified as Iran-linked transacted mostly in USDT, and that the analytics firm Elliptic has traced $507 million of USDT to Iran's central bank. That concentration is what lets a single issuer immobilize large sums on request.
The public record of blocked money this year starts in April, when Tether froze two TRON wallets holding a combined $344 million after the Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the addresses as part of Iran's sanctions-evasion network. It was the largest single freeze the issuer had carried out against a state actor. In August, Treasury issued a determination allowing it to sanction any person anywhere operating in Iran's digital asset sector, extending a sectoral authority under Executive Order 13902 that until then reached only the financial and petroleum industries.
Treasury has also worked through the exchanges. It has sanctioned seven Iranian crypto venues since June, according to The Block: Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex in June, Shelbit and Aban Tether in August, and BitBank in September over alleged bitcoin transfers to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A Treasury release in June cited an earlier estimate of nearly $500 million. In July, the department moved against wallets rather than platforms, and the same month it cut off two front companies Iran had built to charge Strait of Hormuz transit fees in bitcoin, designating eight tankers alongside them.
The individual figures are hard to reconcile. The Block, citing the onchain analyst Specter, put July's wallet action at four TRON addresses holding about $131 million in USDT that Tether blacklisted. One of the two wallets frozen in April held about $131.3 million. Whether July's number is separate money or the same addresses counted a second time is not something the available reports settle, so the sums here are left as the individual announcements gave them.
Prosecutors have used forfeiture as well as sanctions. Cryptopolitan reported that federal prosecutors filed a civil forfeiture case in September seeking about $61 million in crypto. A forfeiture case is the route by which the government asks a court to transfer title, rather than asking an issuer to stop a transfer.
The freezes themselves are being contested. On Monday, Conduit Technology asked a federal court in Manhattan to rule that Tether had no legal right to freeze $2.76 million of the payments firm's USDT, and to order the tokens released. That dispute concerns a Brazilian investigation rather than Iran, but it shows what a blacklisting is: a private decision by an issuer, which a holder can take to court.
Bessent gave no date beyond this week, and named no wallet, exchange or custodian holding the money he expects to take.
