That apparently nonchalant attitude caught up with Binance and its chief executive officer, Changpeng Zhao, on Tuesday. In announcing US$4.3 billion in fines against the company and a guilty plea by Zhao for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering laws, the US government put Hamas and other terrorist organizations front and center. The broad settlement also resolves the CFTC suit.
In February 2019, Binance Holdings’ then-Chief Compliance Officer Samuel Lim acknowledged that the cryptocurrency exchange was being used to funnel money to Hamas, explaining to a colleague that terrorists normally sent “small sums.”
Hamas could “barely buy an AK47 with 600 bucks,” the colleague responded in a chat message, according to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s March lawsuit against the world’s largest crypto exchange.
