Bank of Thailand targets USDT, cash and gold flows in gray money crackdown

Thailand’s central bank is tightening surveillance on stablecoins and cash transactions as part of a wider push against money laundering, illicit finance and the country’s “gray economy.” For PSPs and banks touching Thailand, the important part is simple: more scrutiny on high-volume USDt (USDT) flows, currency exchanges and gold bullion activity, with source-of-funds checks moving closer to the center of the process.

1. The Bank of Thailand is working with the Securities and Exchange Commission to audit high-volume stablecoin transactions, with a particular focus on USDt (USDT), cash transactions and currency exchanges. Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said, according to The Nation, that the measures are not short-term fixes and require “the continuous deployment of multiple parallel strategies.”
2. The target is Thailand’s “gray economy,” which the source describes as cash that may have come from suspicious origins, including scam call centers that have proliferated in the region. While there are no reliable figures for the gray economy itself, scam losses were 115 billion THB ($3.4 billion) in 2025, and around 173 million scam calls and texts were recorded.
3. The compliance net is widening across commercial banks, cash networks, currency exchanges, gold bullion trading and “suspicious stablecoin transactions.” High-value cash transactions will require a source-of-funds declaration, large exchanges of big banknotes for smaller denominations without a clear business reason will be monitored, and cash deposits of more than 5 million baht ($150,000) will require full disclosure.
4. Thailand has often been marketed as a crypto haven, but digital asset and stablecoin payments are still outlawed by the central bank, and crypto businesses face regular rule tightening. Crypto trading remains legal, and the country’s largest exchange, Bitkub, sees about $26 million in daily volume; nearly 40% of that is forex, with the USDT/THB pair the most popular, according to CoinGecko.
5. The backdrop matters because Thailand’s banks already imposed sweeping account restrictions and froze three million bank accounts in 2025 during a crackdown on mule accounts, gray capital and suspicious activity. Media reports later described the fallout as a “scammer crackdown gone wrong,” after thousands of individuals and legitimate businesses were caught in the dragnet.

For high-risk PSPs, the practical read-through is that Thailand is not just looking at crypto rails in isolation. It is trying to connect stablecoins, cash, forex and gold into one compliance picture, which usually means more questions at onboarding, more monitoring on settlement patterns and less patience for flows that cannot explain themselves cleanly.