Thailand’s central bank to step up as they continue to face high cases of Money laundering and illicit funding tied to stablecoins.
The Bank of Thailand in collaboration with the Kingdom’s Securities and Exchange Commission aims to audit large stablecoins transactions. Focusing on USDT, along with cash and several foreign exchange transactions.
Thailand and their “Gray Economy”
The focus if this collaboration is to target Thailand’s “gray economy”. Which consists of large suspicious funds, linked to scam call centers that expand in some parts of the region. In 2025, the Scam loss already amounted to 115 million baht ($3.4 billion), and 173 million for the scam calls and text on the same period.
Although this is the case, Thailand still wants to keep crypto trading legal while treating stablecoin flows as a systemic risk use for money laundering. This implies a more tightened compliance burden for every exchange, bank, and gold shop in the country.
Efforts to Combat the problem
In an effort to prevent regulated entities from facilitating or contributing to this “gray economy”. the rules will extend across to cash transactions, currency exchanges, gold trading and “suspicious stablecoin transactions”.
Cash deposits for more than 5 million baht, or about $150,000, will now be required to show a declaration of source funds. Authorities will also check for smaller denominations without a clear business reason.
It is important to note that Crypto trading is legal in Thailand, it is just that using digital assets and stablecoins as mode of payment is banned. According to CoinGecko, Bitkub, Thailand’s largest exchange still records about $26 million on trading volume by daily average, and 40% of that mainly comes from USDT-Thai baht trading pair.
Although the use of USDT and USDC was approved by The Bank of Thailand (BoT) it must still follow the tight rule for crypto businesses.
Additionally, Thai authorities have imposed account restrictions resulting to freezing over three million bank accounts during the 2025 crackdown.
However, many legitimate businesses and individuals were dragged along, causing controversy and was dubbed as” scammer crackdown gone wrong”.
At the same time countries such as South Korea, France and Brazil had also tightened up their rules to combat any crypto-related money laundering.
