Tether can blacklist any address at the contract level. It usually comes down to one of three reasons.
Tether works with investigators. Addresses linked to hacks, scams or sanctioned entities get blacklisted, often along with the whole path the money took.
You can get frozen without doing anything wrong — a P2P counterparty sends you USDT that traces back to stolen or laundered funds.
Wallets that quickly forward flagged funds look like part of a laundering ring. Tether often freezes the entire pass-through chain at once.
A Tether freeze goes through Submission → Confirmation → Execution. SafeON monitors submitted proposals, so a "pending freeze" flag appears minutes before the address is actually blocked.
No, and be careful: anyone who promises to lift a freeze for a fee is almost certainly a scammer. Only Tether can remove a freeze, usually through a legal process. SafeON's job is to keep you away from frozen or about-to-be-frozen addresses in the first place.
A Tether blacklist only locks the USDT at that address. Other tokens and TRX/ETH can still be moved. But if you deposited from a flagged address to an exchange, your exchange account may be restricted too.
It means a freeze proposal has been submitted to Tether's multisig contract but hasn't been executed yet. It is almost always executed within minutes, so treat a pending flag as a confirmed freeze.
Proceed with caution. A freeze history is a serious red flag even after release. SafeON reports it as "high risk", not clean.