Binance served Iranian crypto clients despite US sanctions, company ban

Binance processed trades by clients in Iran despite sanctions by the US ban and ban by the company on doing business in the county.

The US imposed sanctions on Iran in 2018 with Binance banning business in the country the same year, but the world’d biggest crypto exchange ignored this and still served Iranian crypto traders, Reuters reported today.

Seven traders told Reuters that they used their Binance accounts until September 2021 and only lost access when the company tightened its anti-money laundering checks.

Binance “didn’t need identity verification, so we all used it,” said a trader in Tehran who used Binance for two years until September last year.

In August 2019, Binance deemed Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Crimea, “HARD 5 SANCTIONED” jurisdictions, where the exchange would not do business, according to Reuters. The company had poor compliance checks on users until 2021, despite concerns raised by some senior company figures, Reuters reported in January. 

“Binance follows international sanction rules strictly,” the exchange said in a post in March following Western sanctions on Russia. “At Binance, we have assembled a dedicated global compliance task force.”

In response to a request for comment, Binance pointed City A.M. to a blog on its website published today. 

“It is no small task to create legislation to ensure consumer protection, anti-money laundering, and the integrity of the financial system for an ecosystem as complex as has been developed on the blockchain,” the blog post by Chagri Poyraz, Binance’s global head of sanctions, said.

“We follow legal requirements around the world and often put measures in place before they are mandated by regulators or law enforcement.” But he said he “cannot ignore the elephant in the room about traders in sanctioned jurisdictions using readily available tools like VPNs to access platforms.”