- Three Binance compliance execs have hit back at Reuters criticism of the exchange
- The trio argued that Binance was doing much more than Reuters said at halting illicit activity
- They revealed that Binance lost 90% of its customer base after it implemented KYC in 2021
Three high-ranking members of Binance’s compliance division have hit back at a series of Reuters investigations in a Coindesk interview. The trio, which include two former investigators at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s cybercrime unit, complained in an interview with Coindesk how Binance was singled out as a facilitator of crime despite its record being better than other exchanges. They also revealed that mandating Know Your Customer (KYC) processes left them with just 10% of their customer base and lost them billions in revenue.
Reuters Has Targeted Binance
Tigran Gambaryan, Matthew Price and Chagri Poyraz are three of the most important people in the Binance regulatory firmament, and the trio have clearly taken umbrage at the claims made by Reuters in a series of articles savaging the exchange’s crime-fighting efforts; in April the outlet said that Binance had “built ties to a Russian FSB-linked agency” before saying just two months later that it had become “a hub for hackers, fraudsters and drug traffickers”.
A month later the same reporters claimed that Binance was serving Iranian individuals in defiance of U.S. sanctions.
Binance Lost 90% of Customers After KYC
The trio argued that Binance cannot control the money coming into the exchange, but it an control what it does with it when it gets there, claiming that the exchange’s rate of dealing with illicit funds “is better or the same as most exchanges” which they say is made more difficult by the huge volume coming in.
Interestingly, this volume remained high despite allegedly losing 90% of its customer base after implementing KYC in August last year, which is among other decisions the company has taken that have cost it huge sums of money but that were morally the right choice.
Serving Iranians Outside of Iran Isn’t Breaking Sanctions
Gambaryan, Price and Poyraz also revealed that Binance continues to serve Iranian customers in defiance of U.S. sanctions because the clients themselves are not in Iran, which means no sanctions are being breached. This is different to Kraken, however, which is allegedly being investigated for serving Iranians in Iran.
The trio would not reveal where Binance’s head office was, but said that the company had offices all over the world and that it was working closely with law enforcement agencies in those countries, with Gambrayan signing off by saying that, “I hope I could one day give you access to our law enforcement intake to see how much we’re working on and providing for the world.”
Will this be enough for Reuters to hold back? Probably not.
