I'm pretty sure they did try to do this legally, but then they lost the ability to actually send and receive USD from the US. If you tried to do the same thing

I'm pretty sure they did try to do this legally, but then they lost the ability to actually send and receive USD from the US. If you tried to do the same thing you'd run into the same problem. If the effective point of your tether is to allow exchanges to avoid enforcing anti-money-laundering controls and skirting legislation requiring them to be properly registered in the states they do business, then good luck finding any US bank that will work with you once they figure this out (either to hold your account if you are US based or to transfer money to and from your international bank if you're international). So what likely started out as a legitimate operation probably found it impossible to continue that way once it could no longer easily exchange tether for USD. So the options were probably to shut down or keep operating "untethered" and basically have a free money printer.