Binance failed for months to cut ties with a payment-processing vendor despite a series of red flags that pointed to possible sanctions evasion and money laundering involving transfers later linked to Iran, according to new reporting by The New York Times. 

Although warning signs had begun appearing in public records and internal transaction data as early as November 2024, Binance continued working with Blessed Trust, a little-known vendor that handled back-office tasks for the exchange, until January 2025. The crypto company’s investigators later found that $1.7 billion had moved from Blessed Trust and another Binance account to a cluster of entities linked to Iran, the newspaper said. 

The red flags included public corporate filings showing that Blessed Trust Chief Executive Zheng Qilong used a Singapore villa as a business address that was also listed by Chinese entrepreneur Wu Junliang, the NYT said. Another of Wu’s firms used a Hong Kong address that the U.S. Commerce Department placed on an export-restriction blacklist in November 2024 after six companies registered there were found to be at risk of violating sanctions against Iran. 

Compliance experts told the Times that common addresses are a standard sanctions-evasion tactic and that the connection should have prompted scrutiny. 

Binance also denied a “know your business” application from Wu’s company, Porchoen Trade, in November 2024, yet large sums continued moving through an account belonging to Wu Jintu, a 78-year-old Chinese businessman who had co-owned a logistics company with Wu Junliang for more than a decade. From January to March 2025, Wu Jintu used Binance to move $439 million to an intermediary that forwarded almost all of it to Iran-linked entities, while more than $300 million had flowed into his account from Blessed Trust, the Times reported. 

Hexa Whale, a now-defunct company, was separately allowed to open an account and move hundreds of millions of dollars even after submitting a fraudulent bank statement that was flagged at the time. 

Investigators also found unusual links between Blessed Trust and Binance itself, including that an account belonging to Zheng and one controlled by a group of Binance employees had both been accessed from the same electronic device. Internal notes on accounts belonging to Zheng and Blessed Trust read, “Don’t block. Internal accounts,” according to the report. 

Binance’s internal investigators began examining Blessed Trust only after law-enforcement alerts arrived last summer, despite the earlier warning signs. Their reports concluded that about $1.2 billion had flowed from Blessed Trust’s Binance account through intermediaries to crypto wallets tied to Iran, while another $500 million reached the same entities from Hexa Whale, according to the NYT. 

Read more at The New York Times