The US Department of Justice has spent years chasing terrorist money through the blockchain, and the latest chapter makes clear that Hamas’s crypto fundraising operation is significantly more persistent than the group publicly admitted.
On September 1, 2026, the DOJ and FBI announced a coordinated series of actions that seized more than $560,000 in digital assets tied to Hamas and its military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, while also taking down digital domains and servers the group used to collect donations.
What the seizures actually looked like
The first major move came in March 2025, when investigators seized approximately $201,400 linked to a network of rotating wallet addresses. Those wallets had collectively moved over $1.5 million since late 2024, a technique designed to obscure the money trail by cycling funds through a rapid series of accounts before cashing out.
The primary token involved across multiple cases was USDT, the stablecoin issued by Tether. The FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office led the blockchain analysis work, tracing USDT flows back to Hamas-linked accounts despite the rotation strategy.
In July 2025, the DOJ filed a civil forfeiture complaint targeting approximately $2 million in digital currency connected to a Gaza-based business called Buy Cash Money and Money Transfer Company, along with its owner, Ahmed M.M. Alaqad. Both had already received sanctions from the US Treasury. One account tied to Buy Cash reportedly received at least $4 million directed toward Hamas operations, making the $2 million forfeiture target a partial recovery from a much larger flow.
Beyond the money, the DOJ also seized control of internet infrastructure, including fundraising domains and servers.
Hamas said it stopped. It didn’t.
In 2023, Hamas publicly announced it was halting crypto fundraising. That announcement came under pressure from exchanges and blockchain analytics firms that had grown more aggressive about flagging Hamas-linked addresses.
The DOJ’s operations tell a different story. The group continued soliciting donations through encrypted platforms well after that public statement.
The DOJ has maintained a sustained campaign against Hamas’s digital fundraising networks since at least 2020. Firms like Chainalysis and TRM Labs have built tools that can cluster addresses by behavior, identify exchange deposit accounts, and map transaction graphs across thousands of hops. The FBI’s ability to connect rotating wallets, each used briefly, to a single Hamas-affiliated operation is a direct product of that analytical capability.
What this means for crypto compliance
Exchanges and wallet providers that handle USDT at scale should expect increased scrutiny on transactions that exhibit rotation patterns or originate from jurisdictions under Treasury sanctions. The Buy Cash case is instructive: a sanctioned money transfer business processed at least $4 million in Hamas-directed funds through identifiable blockchain addresses, and that paper trail survived long enough to support a federal forfeiture complaint.
For stablecoin issuers specifically, the repeated appearance of USDT in these cases will continue to generate questions about issuer-level freezing capabilities. Tether has frozen addresses linked to illicit activity in prior cases when presented with law enforcement requests.