The cryptocurrency exchange posted a response to the recent Reuters post accusing it of being a safe house for “hackers, scammers, and drug dealers.”
Binance, the most prominent exchange by trading volume, already filed a response to a recent report pointing at it as a facilitator of money laundering through its network for criminal actors.
Revealed by Reuters on Monday, the report expressed that Binance had already become a “hub for cybercriminals, scammers and even drug dealers with solid links to the Russia-based dark web market Hydra.
The article expressed that the exchange became a tool for channeling more than $2 billion in illicit assets between 2017 and 2021, reflecting on its flaws and weak security controls and anti-money laundering procedures. It also mentioned, among other things, that the platform gave the green light to the Lazarus hacker team, allegedly based in North Korea, to launder illicit activities achieved through hacking procedures.
Binance Denied Reuters Allegations
In response to the accusations revealed in the report, Binance launched a detailed blog post arguing against many arguments unveiled in the report. Among the statements, the company stated that the report was filled with lies and based on shady data. Along these lines, a spokesperson for the exchange expressed to Forkast that the report focuses its arguments on obsolete information.
Binance expressed they are fully aware of the latest woefully misinformed op-ed by Angus Berwick and said that the article relies on obsolete information from 2019 and unverified personal proof as a supportive base to consolidate a false narrative.
Likewise, Binance denied the fact that digital assets are the ideal scenario to make illicit activities like money laundering flourish, as the report points out, and clarified that the authors of the article do not count on enough Blockchain knowledge.
The entry also highlighted data from the analysis of the blockchain, Chainalysis, which ensures that only 0.15% of all operations achieved with digital assets in 2021 got connected with criminal activities; while the UN expressed that between 2% and 5% of fiat currency has direct ties to the criminal panorama.
The news agency, for its part, said it worked with Chainalysis and Crystal Blockchain, another chain analytics entity, to track its data while checking out court records and statements from law enforcement.
Security Experts Respond: It’s ‘Biased’
The response revealed on Binance’s blog also includes more than 50 pages of email logs between the exchange’s cybersecurity team and Reuters journalists. This information got revealed by the CEO of the platform, Changpeng Zhao, in a tweet in which he denies the accusations and said they only intend to create a scenario filled with fear and uncertainty.
Some of Binance’s security experts also discredited the information provided by the report. In an interview with CoinDesk, Matthew Price, a senior director of investigations at Binance who was the lead investigator for Hydra when working on the IRS criminal investigation, highlighted that the report is highly “biased” and that every exchange has exposure to the crypto markets.
Tigran Gambaryan, the exchange’s global intelligence chief who also worked side by side with the IRS cybercrime unit, explained that the report totally ignores the facts to follow an agenda. He told CoinDes that most of this history got completely ignored. He also stated that nobody can control deposits, people only control the next step they are about to make.
By: Jenson Nuñez
