Israel Has Seized 190 Crypto Exchange Binance Accounts With Alleged Terror Ties Since 2021: Reuters
Israeli authorities have seized approximately 190 Binance accounts with alleged ties to terrorist groups such as Hamas and Daesh since 2021, Reuters reported on Thursday.
The report never cites previously published documents from Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF), a counter-terrorism division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
According to those documents, in January the NBCTF confiscated an undisclosed amount of crypto from two accounts with alleged links to Daesh, a terrorist group based in Syria and Iraq. Other government documents, dating as far back as 2021, claim that more than 100 of the seized Binance accounts had ties to Hamas, an armed Palestinian group that has frequently clashed with the Israeli Defense Forces.
Israeli authorities seized the funds to “thwart the activity” of Daesh and “impair its ability to advance its objectives,” the NBCTF said on its website.
The NBCTF did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.
Israeli law allows the country’s defense minister to order the confiscation of terrorist-related assets, as determined by the Israeli ministry.
Mistakes against money laundering
Binance came under fire last year for policies that critics say encouraged the exchange’s users to flout money laundering controls. Since 2017, the exchange has processed more than $10 billion in payments made by criminal enterprises and other bad actors trying to circumvent U.S. sanctions, Reuters reported.
Binance says it complies with all regulators to ensure its platform is not accessible to terrorists and other nefarious actors. It also said it must go through a lengthy process to determine whether an individual account actually has clear ties to any criminal organizations.
“Regarding the specific organizations mentioned in the article, it is important to clarify that bad actors do not register accounts under the names of their criminal enterprises,” the company said Thursday in a public response to the Reuters report. “This is why our team works with law enforcement and leverages information available only to them to identify individuals who operate accounts for illegal organizations.”
The exchange has a 700-member compliance team that processes 1,300 requests from law enforcement on a weekly basis,” Binance VP of Global Intelligence and Investigations Tigran Gambaryan told CoinDesk at Consensus 2023 in April.
Daesh has seen a resurgence in southern Syria since last year, according to the Middle East Institute.
The once sprawling caliphate controlled between 100,000 and 110,000 square kilometers of land across Syria and Iraq at its height in late 2014. This area shrank to about 4,000 square kilometers after a series of armed conflicts with US and other military groups forced the group to withdraw back. Daesh abandoned its last stronghold in Baghuz, Syria in 2019.
