Thailand Has Now Frozen Nearly 58,000 Crypto Mule Accounts Since 2025
Thailand’s crypto industry is freezing accounts at a meaningful pace. Licensed digital asset operators, the exchanges and brokers that operate under the oversight of Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), have suspended more than 10,000 accounts flagged as suspected mule accounts since new anti-money laundering protocols took effect, the Bangkok Post reported Tuesday, citing TDO chairman Att Thongyai Asavanund.
A mule account, for context, is an account used by a third party, often a fraud victim or a recruited participant, to receive, hold, or transfer money or crypto on behalf of criminals, functioning as an intermediary layer that makes illicit funds harder to trace.
The 10,000 figure represents the outcome of tighter pre-transaction screening, including mandatory additional Know Your Customer (KYC) verification steps before higher-risk transfers clear, and deliberate time delays built into the system to allow suspicious activity flags to be reviewed before funds move.
The TDO, the Thai Digital Asset Operators Trade Association, which represents licensed exchanges and brokers, has been coordinating with Thailand’s SEC, the Bank of Thailand, the Anti-Money Laundering Office (AMLO), and law enforcement agencies including the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau since at least February 2025.
A February 2025 SEC workshop involving all those bodies established expanded data-sharing guidelines allowing crypto operators, banks, and police to share information about suspected mule accounts across sectors in near-real time.
SEC Deputy Secretary-General Jomkwan Kongsakul said at the time that the aim was to issue measures for addressing different types of mule accounts “within an expedited timeframe.” The 10,000 freezes are a product of that infrastructure. The total value of the frozen funds has not been disclosed.
Part of a Broader Crackdown on Gray Money
The account freezes fit inside a wider Thai government initiative targeting what authorities call “gray money,” funds that are not clearly illegal but whose origins are sufficiently opaque to raise AML concerns.
In January 2026, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra ordered the SEC to strictly enforce the Financial Action Task Force’s Travel Rule across all licensed crypto asset service providers, requiring operators to collect and transmit identifying information about both senders and recipients on wallet-to-wallet transfers above threshold amounts.
The same campaign extended to physical gold markets, where regulators identified similar patterns of layering illicit funds through legitimate commodity trades. Thailand has been on the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list since June 2024, which provides direct regulatory motivation to demonstrate measurable enforcement progress before the next FATF review.
The KuCoin Thailand Angle
It is worth noting that the TDO chairman delivering this announcement, Att Thongyai Asavanund, is also the CEO of KuCoin Thailand, the local entity of the Seychelles-based exchange that Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority ordered to halt operations last week for operating without a license.
KuCoin Thailand operates under a separate Thai SEC license and is legally distinct from the entities named in Dubai’s cease-and-desist. The Thai entity’s participation in the TDO’s AML program appears unaffected by the Dubai action.
But the proximity of the two stories is a reminder that the global KuCoin brand is currently navigating compliance challenges in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, a situation many will be watching as the exchange works to rebuild its regulatory standing in Europe and the Middle East.
