Guangxi Liuzhou cracked down on illegal cigarette trafficking crime case through USDT transactions.

On April 29, according to Chinanews Guangxi News, in the early morning of New Year's Day in 2025, the "1.01" virtual currency tobacco-related crime case in Liuzhou, Guangxi, China, was cracked, and a criminal gang that had long used the virtual currency "Tether (USDT)" for illegal tobacco-related transactions was completely eradicated. This is a breakthrough in Guangxi's tobacco monopoly front to crack down on new types of hidden tobacco-related crimes, and it is also a typical case of cracking down on illegal tobacco-related transactions of virtual currency. On September 28, 2024, the monitoring screen of the Liuzhou Tobacco Joint Logistics Command Data Center flashed blue light, and the virtual currency cigarette trading situational awareness system scanned hundreds of millions of data information on the dark web around the clock. Suddenly, an early warning message showed that there was a virtual currency transaction information on an illegal website, which aroused the alarm of the investigators. Immediately, the Liuzhou Municipal Bureau and the relevant departments of the Liuzhou Municipal Public Security Department set up a special team to further investigate the case. In order to break through the "fog", the task force used the blockchain intelligent node analysis technology to fully analyze the 2 billion "Tether" transaction data and 220 million wallet addresses on the TRON chain, deeply integrated multi-source heterogeneous data, established a multi-dimensional and three-dimensional correlation of 100-million-level data lake, and used big data as a "navigation" for case investigation. Taking the wallet address involved in the case as a breakthrough, the task force monitored the transaction flow and transaction amount in real time, and found that its capital transactions were unusually frequent, with a cumulative transaction flow of more than 30,000 "Tether", equivalent to about RMB 217,000. Through association expansion, the investigators found 7 associated wallets and locked 2 key transaction hashes (unique identifiers for each virtual currency transaction) associated with overseas exchanges. At this point, an illegally operated core account surfaced. In order to solve the problem of real-name authentication of anonymous wallet addresses, the task force cleans, denoises and normalizes the obtained verification data of virtual currency exchanges, constructs a structured data set, and finally binds anonymous addresses to real people. On November 30, 2024, the task force locked down the source den of the criminal gang and found out the whole picture of the case: 12 people, including Wu and Qin, formed a criminal gang and operated in the mode of "online matchmaking-virtual settlement-logistics distribution", forming a hidden tobacco-related criminal chain. On January 1 this year, the task force took action and arrested 12 local suspects in Liuzhou, seizing 84,400 illegal cigarettes, involving a transaction volume of 28,625 "Tether". In the interrogation room, the suspect Huang regretted that he was not at the beginning: "I thought that I could use virtual currency to be seamless, but I didn't expect it to be exposed so soon."