Binance

As of September 2026: The corporate resolution, the plea and the sentence are final. The five-year Treasury monitorship runs into the late 2020s, and the pardon covers Zhao's personal conviction only. Reported ties between Binance and businesses linked to the Trump family are contested and are not evidence about the 2023 charges.

Also known as: Binance and CZ · Changpeng Zhao plea.

What happened?

Binance grew from a start-up in 2017 into the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, a platform where users could trade dozens of coins with little friction. According to the 2023 US resolutions, that growth came with a deliberate gap: controls that a bank or regulated broker would consider basic were missing or ignored.

FinCEN found that Binance operated as an unregistered money services business and had weak know-your-customer procedures. In its years of operation it never filed a single suspicious activity report, despite processing more than 100,000 transactions that met the threshold for concern. Those transactions included funds linked to terrorist groups, ransomware and darknet markets.

Treasury separately said Binance carried out 1.67 million trades between US persons and users in sanctioned jurisdictions, including Iran, North Korea, Syria and Crimea, between August 2017 and October 2022. It also said the company undermined its own controls, including by suggesting that users employ VPNs to get around location blocks.

Which techniques did it use?

Binance itself was not a laundering scheme in the way a shell company network is. It mattered as infrastructure. An exchange is where crypto meets the rest of the economy: coins are swapped between assets, moved between blockchains and converted to cash. When one large exchange does not identify its customers, criminals gain a place to do all three at scale.

That covers the exit ramps described in the techniques section and the swaps across networks known as chain-hopping. Exchanges are the point where investigators can still attach an identity to a wallet, which is why identity checks matter.

How was it found?

US agencies built the case in parallel. The Department of Justice, FinCEN, OFAC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission each examined a different set of violations: criminal money laundering and sanctions charges, Bank Secrecy Act failures, sanctions breaches, and derivatives-market rules. Each agency could show that the same underlying weakness, a compliance program that did not match the company’s size and risk, produced different kinds of violations.

What was the outcome?

On November 21, 2023, Binance pleaded guilty and agreed to pay about US$4.3 billion in combined penalties. FinCEN’s US$3.4 billion and OFAC’s US$968 million were each the largest in those agencies’ history at the time. Binance also agreed to leave the US market and to a five-year monitorship with Treasury access to its systems and records, with a US$150 million penalty suspended pending compliance.

Founder Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, pleaded guilty the same day to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. He paid a US$50 million personal fine and stepped down as chief executive. On April 30, 2024 he was sentenced to four months in prison and was released in September 2024.

On October 23, 2025, President Trump pardoned Zhao. The pardon removes his personal conviction; it did not refund the corporate settlement or his fine. Coverage at the time noted Binance’s business ties to a Trump-family crypto venture, and the White House said the prosecution had been overzealous. Those are the subject of political dispute rather than findings about the original conduct.

What were the warning signs?

The Binance record reads like a list of things a compliance officer looks for and did not find, according to the regulators.

• No customer identification to speak of. FinCEN said the exchange had weak know-your-customer procedures, so the person behind a wallet often stayed unknown.
• Volume that should have produced reports. More than 100,000 transactions met the threshold for a suspicious activity report and none was filed.
• Users in sanctioned places. 1.67 million trades involved sanctioned jurisdictions, which good location and identity controls would have blocked.
• Advice on getting around the controls. Treasury said the company suggested that users employ VPNs, which turns a compliance measure into a formality.
• Counterparties that should have raised alarms. FinCEN said the flows included transactions tied to terrorist groups, ransomware and darknet markets.

What changed afterwards?

The Binance resolution changed the economics of crypto compliance. A large exchange learned that skipping identity checks and reporting could cost billions and lead to a criminal conviction. Exchanges worldwide have since invested more in address screening, travel rule compliance and reporting.

The case also shows the limits of that model. A penalty arrives years after the conduct, and the pardon showed that even a prosecution that reaches a founder can be reversed by politics. Meanwhile the platform remains one of the busiest gateways in crypto, which is why its accounts still appear in new cases. In September 2026, prosecutors in Manhattan alleged that two Chinese firms used trading accounts there to convert Iranian oil proceeds into crypto. Binance is not a defendant, and the allegations have not been proven. For how regulators and analysts trace this kind of activity, see the detection overview.

First published September 21, 2026 · Last updated September 21, 2026 · Legal statuses current as of September 2026