Even worse, they tried to get an audit, but it ended up with them and their auditor ending the process without producing an audit. Apparently they weren't too happy the auditor wanted to actually take a close look:

“We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.” - Tether spokesperson

See https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-and-tether-is-unaudi...

>flat-out lying about audits

Huh? They did do audits https://tether.to/announcement-transparency-update/ and they don't say they must be as public or as comprehensive as the community demands.

Their cheerleaders usually reply claiming that they're under no obligation to publish audits and pretend that statement doesn't exist on the website, or is an old outdated webpage they forgot to remove.

> Sure, assumptions don't make rumors true but them flat-out lying about audits and transparency speaks louder than anything else and we're not even getting into how it took the Panama papers leak for the public to find out that several of the people in charge of Tether and the people in charge of Bitfinex being the same.

An interesting fact is that all of the original RealCoin/Tether founders (Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, Craig Sellars) are now associated with a pair of connected blockchain startups: BLOCKV[1] and vAtomic[2].

[1]: https://blockv.io/#team

[2]: https://www.vatomic.io/ (this is, incidentally, another of vAtomic's founders, "accused of paying $2.5 million of bribes to two technology executives at the bank, so they would arrange $10.4 million of contracts to inflate his company’s revenue." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-servicemesh-cba-bribery/e...)