Binance failed to stop hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency flowing through suspicious user accounts even after pledging to tighten controls under a landmark $4.3 billion US criminal settlement in 2023, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
The newspaper quoted leaked internal documents as saying that accounts showing multiple warning signs continued to trade on the world's largest cryptocurrency platform, including links to alleged terrorist financing networks, unreasonable login activity, and failed identity checks.
According to the report, some users transferred sums as high as eight and nine figures through their accounts in patterns that experts say typically lead to account freezes or investigations by regulated banks.
The Financial Times reported that an account linked to a resident of a poor neighborhood in Venezuela processed about $93 million between 2021 and this year, with some of the money traced to a network that US authorities later accused of secretly transferring funds to Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah.
The report stated that many of the accounts reviewed continued to operate after Binance's November 2023 agreement with US authorities, despite its commitments to strengthen transaction monitoring and sanctions controls.
These results come at a time when Binance has rebounded since its settlement, and amid easing US political scrutiny of cryptocurrency enforcement laws following President Donald Trump's pardon of the company's founder, Changpeng Zhao, according to the Financial Times.
