Crypto exchange Binance continued to process payments with relaxed anti-money laundering standards after reaching a plea deal and paying a record fine of more than $4 billion related to those insufficient policies in 2023, according to a new Financial Times report released early Monday morning. The new investigation reveals hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transfers made by 13 specific Binance accounts, some of which had links to terrorist groups.
The Financial Times report indicates that practices intended to end as part of the crypto exchange’s plea deal, such as preventing individuals not tied to the personally identifiable information held on file from using accounts, are still ongoing. The report covers the specifics of multiple accounts where hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions were being made by unknown sources and with suspicious activity in terms of the payments’ sourcing and destinations. The suspicious accounts are said to have made $1.7 billion in payments, with $144 million of that coming after Binance’s plea deal.
Examples of the specifics regarding these accounts include a Brazilian man whose form of identification held on file was more than two decades old and had an illegible birth date, in addition to an account tied to a Venezuelan woman who changed the bank details on her account 647 times in a matter of fourteen months. The account associated with the Brazilian man had received more than $10 million worth of crypto, including from crypto addresses associated with the terror organization Al-Law, while the account tied to the Venezuelan woman had more than $100 million worth of funds move through it.
The report quotes multiple anti-money laundering lawyers who looked at the data and indicated there were a large number of red flags that would be obvious to compliance teams at any traditional bank or financial institution. In a response to a request for comment from Financial Times, Binance called the allegations “grotesquely sensationalist.”
This new report follows a similar report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists last month that also indicated Binance and other international crypto exchanges were continuing to operate with insufficient anti-money laundering standards.
Notably, former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was recently pardoned by President Trump for his role in the relaxed anti-money laundering standards during his time at the crypto exchange. The pardon has faced strong accusations of unprecedented corruption, as Binance has at least one major business dealing with the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial involving $2 billion of the crypto entity’s USD1 stablecoin. More recently, the business relationship between World Liberty Financial and Binance has strengthened, with more integrations between Binance and the USD1 stablecoin, according to CoinDesk.
President Trump has also received criticism for his many other crypto projects, such as a memecoin and a tokenized hotel development, which he has been involved with during his administration’s reversal of the more restrictive crypto regulatory environment under Biden.
While CZ received a pardon from Trump, a pair of privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet developers were not so lucky. Samourai Wallet co-founder Keonne Rodriguez recently reported for the beginning of a five-year prison sentence for charges also related to money laundering, despite never taking custody of user funds with his software.
Of course, the Samourai Wallet developers do not have any business dealings with the Trump family, which critics say explains why the developers’ request for pardons fell on deaf ears, at least up to this point. At an event last week, Trump said he would look into a potential pardon for the Samourai Wallet developers.
During his first few days in office, Trump also pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who had been serving a life sentence as the convicted operator of darknet marketplace Silk Road.
