Binance will not blindly comply with the Israeli military's request to block crypto wallets owned by Palestinians and others, according to the company's head of financial crime investigations. Decrypt.
“We don't rely on just one source or one tool,” Binance's head of global financial investigations, Niels Andersson Royd, said of how he handles inquiries from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
At the end of August, Binance CEO Richard Teng strongly They denied the allegations. At the behest of the IDF, the world's largest crypto exchange has frozen the wallets of all its Palestinian customers.
Teng continued Interview with Decrypt In the case in question, the IDF asked Binance to freeze more than 1,500 wallets belonging to Palestinians. According to Teng, Binance found that only about 220 of these wallets, or 14% of those requested to be suspended, showed “legitimate” signs of being linked to illegal transactions under international law. Those are only selected wallets, Teng were eventually banned from trading on Binance.
talk with Decrypt At the Mesari Minet conference in New York this week, Binance Rode said his team would conduct independent open-source intelligence research in parallel with governments such as Israel, should disputes arise about “illegal” activity.
For example, Rhode said, Binance's internal team instead had “information to believe it might be related to a charity,” while the IDF could say a crypto wallet was linked to terrorist financing.
In such cases, according to Royd, the financial investigation team will consult with Binance's lawyers and then discuss with the law enforcement agency in question what steps to take next that are consistent with international law and do not violate users' rights.
These conversations, for example, led Binance to reject 86% of the wallet requests it recently received from Israel.
Royd, a cybersecurity veteran who previously investigated dark web crimes for Europol and the Dutch government, said Binance has allocated more resources to ensure its investigations in hot key regions like the Middle East are up to date.
“We're doing a lot of extra checks, especially with highly sensitive cases like this,” he said.
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