Guangxi Liuzhou cracked down on illegal cigarette trading case through USDT

Mars Finance News, on April 29, according to Guangxi News from China News Network, in the early morning of New Year's Day 2025, the "1•01" virtual currency-related tobacco crime case in Liuzhou, Guangxi Province was cracked. A criminal gang that had long been using virtual currency "USDT" for illegal tobacco transactions was completely eliminated. This is a breakthrough in Guangxi's tobacco monopoly front's crackdown on new, covert tobacco-related crimes, and a typical case of combating illegal tobacco transactions using virtual currency. On September 28, 2024, the monitoring screen at the Liuzhou Tobacco Joint Command Data Center flickered with blue light, with the virtual currency cigarette trading trend perception system scanning billions of data information on the Dark Web around the clock. Suddenly, a warning message showed a virtual currency transaction on an illegal website, alerting the case handlers. Immediately, the Liuzhou Municipal Bureau jointly formed a special task force with the city's public security departments to conduct a further investigation. To break through the "fog," the task force used blockchain intelligent node parsing technology to comprehensively analyze 2 billion "USDT" transaction data and 220 million wallet addresses on the TRON chain, deeply integrating multi-source heterogeneous data to establish a billion-level data lake with multi-dimensional and three-dimensional correlations, using big data to "navigate" the case investigation. Using the involved wallet addresses as a breakthrough, the task force monitored transaction flows and amounts in real-time, discovering abnormally frequent fund transfers with a cumulative transaction flow of over 30,000 "USDT," approximately 217,000 yuan. Through associated expansion, the case handlers identified 7 associated wallets and locked onto 2 key transaction hashes linked to overseas exchanges. At this point, a core illegal operating account emerged. To solve the problem of anonymizing wallet address identification, the task force cleaned, denoised, and normalized the obtained virtual currency exchange certification data, constructing a structured dataset that ultimately bound anonymous addresses to real individuals. On November 30, 2024, the task force located the criminal gang's source den and clarified the full picture of the case: Wu and Qin, among 12 others, formed a criminal gang operating through an "online matchmaking—virtual settlement—logistics delivery" model, creating a covert tobacco crime chain. On January 1st this year, the task force took action, arresting 12 local suspects in Liuzhou, seizing 84,400 illegal cigarettes, involving a transaction volume of 28,625 "USDT". In the interrogation room, suspect Huang regretfully said: "I thought using virtual currency would be foolproof, but I didn't expect to be exposed so quickly."