The world’s largest crypto exchange platform by volume is reportedly being sued in New York by the victims of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel.
According to a new report by ABC News, Binance is being sued by the families of the victims for allegedly providing the terrorist group with a funding mechanism.
The lawsuit, which was filed earlier this week by an American woman freed from Gaza and the families of two men killed during the October 7th attack, accuses Binance of processing numerous transactions for Hamas between 2017 and 2023.
According to a filing by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the crypto exchange failed to report “transactions with cryptocurrency wallets that Binance senior executives had knowledge were linked to terrorist groups such as Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad.”
Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that Binance went out of its way to obfuscate the actions of Hamas to keep making profits from its transactions.
As stated in the lawsuit, according to ABC,
“For years, Binance remained willfully blind to the use of its platform by illicit actors, including terrorists, by failing to do any due diligence on the vast majority of its users prior to August 2021.
Incredibly, Binance went out of its way to protect users associated with Hamas and other terrorist groups from regulatory scrutiny, especially if they were ‘VIP users who generated huge profits for Binance.”
Last year, Binance and its former chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to violating anti-money laundering laws and agreed to pay more than $4 billion in fines. Zhao ended up stepping down from his role as CEO.
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