Liuzhou, Guangxi cracked the illegal cigarette trading case through USDT

According to BlockBeats, on April 29th, according to Guangxi News of China News Service, in the early morning of New Year's Day 2025, the "1.01" virtual currency related illegal tobacco crime case in Liuzhou, Guangxi, China was solved, and a criminal gang that had long used the virtual currency "USDT" for illegal tobacco transactions was completely eradicated. This is a breakthrough in the Guangxi tobacco monopoly front's crackdown on new hidden tobacco related illegal crimes, and also a typical case of cracking down on illegal transactions of virtual currency related to tobacco. On September 28, 2024, the monitoring screen of Liuzhou Tobacco Joint Logistics Command Data Center flashed blue light, and the virtual currency cigarette trading situation perception system scanned billions of data information in the dark web around the clock. Suddenly, a warning message showed that there was a virtual currency transaction on an illegal website, which alerted the investigators. Subsequently, the Liuzhou Municipal Bureau immediately formed a special task force in conjunction with relevant departments of Liuzhou Public Security to further investigate the case. To break through the "fog", the task force used blockchain intelligent node parsing technology to fully parse 2 billion "Tether" transaction data and 220 million wallet addresses on the TRON Chain, deeply integrating heterogeneous data from multiple sources and establishing a multi-dimensional and three-dimensional correlation billion level data lake, using big data as the "navigation" for case investigation. Taking the wallet address involved as a breakthrough point, the special task force monitored the transaction flow and amount in real time, and found that the fund transactions were unusually frequent, with a cumulative transaction flow of more than 30000 "Tether coins", about 217000 yuan. Through association expansion, investigators identified 7 associated wallets and locked the key transaction hashes (unique identifiers for each virtual currency transaction) of 2 associated overseas exchanges. At this point, an illegal core account has surfaced. To solve the problem of real name authentication of anonymous wallet addresses, the task force cleaned, denoised, and normalized the obtained virtual currency exchange verification data, constructed a structured dataset, and finally bound anonymous addresses with real people. On November 30, 2024, the special task force identified the source hideout of the criminal gang and uncovered the full picture of the case: a criminal gang consisting of 12 people including Wu and Qin operated in a "online matching virtual settlement logistics agency" mode, forming a hidden chain of tobacco related crimes. On January 1st of this year, the special task force took action and arrested 12 local suspects involved in the case in Liuzhou, seized 84400 illegal cigarettes, and involved a transaction volume of 28625 "Tether coins". In the interrogation room, Mr. Huang, the suspect, repented: "I thought that using virtual currency would be perfect, but I didn't expect to be exposed so soon."