Terrorist Financing

Binance internal investigators identified VIP accounts they said helped channel more than $1 billion to wallets tied to Iran-linked entities, including one account registered to a 79-year-old Chinese resident and another linked to a suspected Iranian gold smuggler.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday announced two new sanctions actions targeting financing and revenue-generation networks tied to Hamas and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

A federal judge in Manhattan on Wednesday granted a 90-day pause in the criminal case against Turkey’s state-run Halkbank, a first step toward a possible dismissal of charges that the bank helped launder billions of dollars in Iranian oil and gas proceeds.

Gaps in the international oversight of offshore virtual-asset firms have made it possible for criminals to commit large-scale fraud, money laundering, and terrorism financing beyond the reach of most supervisory bodies, according to FATF.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Iran’s use of Binance to evade U.S. sanctions, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

Banks and investors are failing to adequately screen for illegal mining risks even when operating in sectors highly exposed to the trade, according to a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and financial-crime risk platform Themis.

A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a civil lawsuit that sought to hold Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, liable for transactions allegedly linked to terrorist groups behind 64 attacks worldwide.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) said that stablecoins are now commonly used in money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing schemes, and warned that peer-to-peer transfers via unhosted wallets represent a key vulnerability for the crypto ecosystem. 

Stablecoin issuer Tether said it has frozen about $4.2 billion of its USDT tokens over links to “illicit activity,” with most of the freezes occurring in the past three years, as authorities worldwide intensify efforts to curb crypto-related crime.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on Thursday proposed a Section 311 “special measure” that, if finalized, would cut MBaer Merchant Bank AG off from the American financial system.