On September 14, nearly $79.11 million vanished from a single brokerage account at Wells Fargo Securities — not to hackers, but to a court order. The US Department of Justice is now trying to keep $84.2 million seized from accounts prosecutors say ran an unlicensed money-transfer operation that also processed payments for Tether, the world's largest stablecoin issuer.
The civil forfeiture complaint was actually filed back on July 15 in the Eastern District of California, before Judge Dale A. Drozd. The target is Capstone Ltd., a Montana-based payments firm prosecutors say is owned by Kotaro Shimogori and Mary Jeanne Thompson. According to the complaint, Capstone told banks it was an ordinary IT services company while quietly moving money without a license in at least six states. Steering the operation, prosecutors allege, was EQIBank, a Dominica-licensed digital bank — the same institution that handles wire transfers for Tether. Prosecutors also allege that Capstone's accounts carried proceeds from an impersonation scam, in which fraudsters posed as FBI agents and converted stolen cash into USDT — apparently what drew investigators' attention in the first place.
Beyond the $79.11 million pulled from that Wells Fargo account, the filing covers another $1.86 million at Wells Fargo, $2.06 million at JPMorgan Chase, and $1.1 million split across two USDT wallets.
Tether confirmed it banks through EQIBank but says it had no knowledge of the conduct under investigation, putting its exposure at under 0.034% of group assets — against roughly $187.75 billion in reserves and $184.6 billion in circulating USDT as of the second quarter. Capstone and EQIBank deny wrongdoing, have filed an innocent-owner defense, and say they want the matter resolved quickly; neither company faces criminal charges so far.
The case is a reminder of an old problem: big US banks still keep stablecoin issuers at arm's length, so billions in flows end up routed through small, thinly regulated partners like EQIBank instead.
