If I recall, one Tether executive was holding a good portion of the “reserves” in his personal bank account.

How it is that Tether trades on par with trustworthy alternatives like USDC, Paxos and Gemini, I have no idea.

Yeah, it's in the NYAG settlement I linked as [3]. At one point, all their money was in Stuart Hoegner's personal Bank of Montreal account (#17 in [3]).

Hoegner (their GC) was the director of compliance at Excapsa, the parent company of the wildly non-compliant Ultimate Bet. That online poker site had a back door where some of their friends could see other poker players cards [1]

[1] https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/03/27/before-bitfinex-and-te...

In their defense, they probably thought this whole Tether thing would have imploded by now, and they needed to be ready to make their getaway.

I think it's strange as well. There's all this uncertainty surrounding USDT. Why won't people switch to the other stable coins? Makes no sense. USDT markets still have the most liquidity and the peg remains unbroken.

"All[1] of our[2] coins are backed[3] one-to-one[4] by USD[5]".

[1] Not really though

[2] Yours really

[3] Not in a way you'd think

[4] Approx but we can't tell you exactly how much

[5] ish

[6] also it doesn't matter because we get to decide who, if anyone, is allowed to redeem - and on what schedule - and should we feel like it, what we give you. Also US persons are never allowed to redeem. This is all in their terms of service. Their backing really doesn't matter because they're not obligated by anyone to ever give it out.

> are they counting bank accounts in other people’s names?

yes, it was a personal account in the name of iFinex general counsel Stuart Hoegner.

And various holdings at non-banks, e.g. the $850m that disappeared at Crypto Capital Corp.