![]() This called for what Yellen characterized as “the largest enforcement action in Treasury’s history,” with the respective Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Office of Foreign Assets Control fines alone adding up to the aforementioned $4.3 billion. And it also allowed over 1.5 million virtual currency trades that violated U.S. Binance processed these transactions, but it never filed a single suspicious activity report. That includes transactions associated with terrorist groups like Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaida, and ISIS. Their findings: “Binance was allowing illicit actors to transact freely, supporting activities from child sexual abuse to illegal narcotics to terrorism, across more than 100,000 transactions. It makes you a criminal.”Īfter Garland finished, Yellen stepped up to say her piece on the company whose name she pronounced “bih-NANCE.” “Over more than three years, FinCEN, OFAC, and IRS Criminal Investigation thoroughly investigated key aspects of Binance’s activities,” she began. “The message here should be clear: Using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor. “In just the past month, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted the CEOs of two of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges in two separate criminal cases,” he thundered, referring to the recently concluded case against Sam Bankman-Fried. ![]() Per the CEO, it was “better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Garland concluded with a statement directly aimed toward the crypto Wild West. from jump-and reap the spoils from the two-year period in which it had no registered U.S. connections, including by creating new accounts that obscured their locations.” This was, CZ wrote privately, so that Binance could continue to grow-much of its trading had taken place in the U.S. users to remain on the unregistered exchange.” And more: “At the direction of Zhao and other senior leaders at Binance, employees encouraged their high-volume U.S. exchange,” Garland explained, the international enterprise “continued to allow some of its most important, high-volume U.S. ![]() users on and redirected them to the U.S. But even though “Binance blocked some U.S. ![]() The attorney general alluded to the creation of the Binance.US corporation in 2019, putatively so the exchange had a website that specifically followed stateside regulations and an international branch that functioned for the rest of the world. laws around financial-service registration, but had pretended to comply while acknowledging privately they were doing nothing of the sort. Garland also made clear that Binance employees had not only violated U.S. Binance engaged in business with another notorious money launderer, the crypto-anonymizing service Bestmixer, until the latter was forced to shut down in May 2019.Beginning in August 2017, right when the platform came into being, various Binance traders came to amass a total of $106 million in Bitcoin from Hydra, the Russia-based darknet hub of illegal activity that was shut down by the DOJ and German authorities in April 2022.The exchange also allowed for “millions of dollars” in sanctioned trades with users based in Syria and in Russian-occupied Ukrainian states.What kinds of suspicious activity? According to Garland: “Binance has agreed to plead guilty to willfully violating the Bank Secrecy Act, knowingly failing to register as a money-transmitting business, and willfully violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act,” the attorney general declared, adding that the government was “requiring Binance to pay $4.3 billion in penalties and forfeiture,” making for “one of the largest penalties we have ever obtained from a corporate defendant in a criminal matter.” Further, the administration is imposing extra monitorship over Binance and requiring that the company go back over its past transactions so it can file reports on suspicious activity it had freely allowed on its exchange. In his opening statement, Garland announced the “criminal enforcement” his department was enacting in addition to the civil actions from Treasury and the CFTC. ![]() Not long after CZ registered his plea, officials held a cross-department press conference on the actions against Binance, featuring Attorney General Merrick Garland, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam. ![]()
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