According to CoinMeta, as reported by Bitcoin.com, Venezuela has seen a scam involving the use of zero-value clones of USDT to defraud customers. Scammers require merchants to receive payments through self-hosted wallets and transfer the funds to fake USDT addresses that do not match the official contract addresses. As a result, merchants have lost over $5,500 worth of goods despite the wallet showing that the payment has been completed. Juan Kassabji advises merchants to use Binance for receiving payments or to verify that the contract address matches the official Tether address after receiving payments through self-hosted wallets.