TL;DR
- The Financial Times claims that Binance allowed suspicious accounts to keep trading after its $4.3B settlement in 2023, without immediately enforcing stricter anti-money-laundering controls.
- Thirteen accounts moved roughly $1.7 billion in crypto, showing logins from multiple countries and extreme banking detail changes within very short timeframes.
- Some of the funds were linked to wallets later associated with terrorism; Binance denied that any on-chain alerts were triggered.
Binance is under investigation by the Financial Times, which alleges that the platform allowed accounts with clear signs of suspicious activity to continue operating even after finalizing its 2023 settlement with the United States.
That agreement involved a $4.3B payment and an explicit commitment to strengthen anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer controls. According to the investigation, those commitments were not immediately reflected in measures that effectively regulated activity on the exchange.
What Did the Financial Times Find?
The Financial Times analyzed thirteen accounts that collectively moved about $1.7 billion in crypto assets. Of that total, at least $144M was processed after November 2023, the same day Binance formalized its agreement with U.S. authorities. The accounts displayed classic high-risk patterns: funds moving in and out within 24 hours, constant changes to banking details, and logins from geographically distant countries within short periods. In one case, a user changed banking information 647 times in just fourteen months.
The accounts originated from Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Niger, and China. Some records showed logins from Caracas and Osaka only hours apart. One Venezuelan user, who registered in 2022, allegedly received more than $177M in under two years and used 496 different bank accounts to off-ramp funds across multiple countries in the Americas.
Part of the analyzed flows was linked to wallets that were later frozen by Israel under anti-terrorism laws. At least $29M in USDT came from addresses associated with Tawfiq Al-Law, who has been accused of funneling funds to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a Syrian company tied to the Bashar al-Assad regime. Those wallets were later seized in May 2023 and sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in March 2024.
Binance Rejects the Allegations, but Its Credibility Takes a Hit
Binance rejected the accusations and stated that, at the time of the transactions, those addresses were not suspected of being linked to terrorist financing. The company also said that leading on-chain analytics tools did not trigger any alerts. Its legal team denied that Binance knowingly facilitated criminal activity.
The U.S. Treasury had previously criticized Binance for failing to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions tied to serious crimes. In November, 306 families of victims of the October 7, 2023 attack filed a lawsuit accusing the platform of enabling money laundering for Hamas and Hezbollah. The exchange again denied the claims. The dispute has put Binance’s credibility under severe strain
