Binance Refutes Reuters Money Laundering Report

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platform is in the news again, and this time, it is based on the exchange’s role in facilitating or permitting money laundering transactions between 2017 and 2022 according to a Reuters investigation, a claim the exchange has refuted.

The publication claimed Binance helped facilitate as much as $2.4 billion within the said time and this involves $780 million on Hydra Market, $840 million from the Finiko Ponzi scheme, $100 million from Pakistan’s Cyber Storm fraud case, and $381 million from the WazirX illegal online betting case. 

As shared by Binance, the reporting was half-baked and despite the fact that there was an email trail between Reuters journalists and Binance, the substantive meetings that could have helped shed more light on the direction of the story were avoided by the Reuters team.

“Sadly, we have seen these types of misleading articles seep into more esteemed media outlets on occasion. One author who has published a number of these “breathless pearl clutching” articles ran another piece today,” Binance said in a response published shortly after the story made the rounds on Monday. “this latest iteration is rife with falsehoods, massive leaps to conclusions, and relies on poor data that could have been fact-checked by reaching out to one of the major on-chain analyst firms, like Chainalysis or TRM.”

Binance Said Crypto Pales in Comparison to Fiat for Money Laundering

While the cryptocurrency ecosystem may be new, Binance acknowledged that the industry is not perfect, however, the trading platform said the blockchain and crypto world is more transparent as it relates to being used for money laundering and detecting the same.

“According to Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company that specializes in crypto and blockchain analysis, of all transactions made with cryptocurrencies in 2021, 0.15% were associated with some type of illicit activity,” the Binance exchange reads. “The UN estimates that between 2% to 5% of traditional fiat (cash), about $800 billion to $2 trillion in current US dollars, was associated with some type of illicit activity.”

While Binance currently maintains its rank as the largest in terms of trading volume, CEO, Changpeng Zhao shared details of how the exchange helped retrieve over $5 million in funds stolen from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge by the Lazarus hacker group back in April.