Tether said it launched a joint initiative with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on Jan. 9. It will target crypto scams, fraud, and trafficking-linked financial flows across Africa. The programs will extend into Papua New Guinea via university partners.

Tether framed the program as support for UNODC’s Strategic Vision for Africa 2030. The organization positions it as a measure to counter organized crime, corruption, terrorism, and illicit financial flows through analytic and technical cooperation.

Tether linked the partnership to an Interpol sweep that uncovered $260 million in illicit crypto and fiat across Africa, a figure that has circulated in law-enforcement narratives about crypto-enabled fraud and terror-finance screening on the continent.

“Through our collaboration with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, we’re backing initiatives that combine innovation and education to empower communities,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO at Tether.

The deliverables sit in three buckets. For Senegal, UNODC and Tether outlined a “multi-phase” youth cybersecurity track. It starts with learning modules and a virtual bootcamp, then moves into coaching and micro-grants. One session involves the Plan B Foundation, a Lugano-linked initiative referenced by Tether.

Secondly, an “Africa Project” will fund civil-society groups providing direct victim support across Senegal, Nigeria, DRC, Malawi, Ethiopia, and Uganda. This puts Tether capital into the same pipeline UN agencies use for trafficking-victim services.

The next is Papua New Guinea. Tether said it will work with the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of Solomon Islands on fraud-prevention awareness and a student competition for blockchain-based crime-prevention and financial-inclusion tooling.

The market setup here sits in the data. Chainalysis clocked $205 billion in on-chain value received in Sub-Saharan Africa from July 2024 to June 2025. The volume is up about 52% year-on-year. This keeps stablecoin rails central to cross-border flows and makes fraud-prevention capacity a throughput constraint, not a PR line item.

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