Binance Penalties Include a Number of Crypto Industry Firsts

The CFTC also imposed charges and fines against Binance’s former chief compliance officer, Samuel Lim, an action a CFTC commissioner said should serve as a message to the crypto sector about their compliance programs.

“[The settlements] represent continued commitment to enforcement and a heightened interest in affecting the compliance efforts in the crypto space,” Alex Zerden, a former Treasury official and now the principal of advisory firm Capitol Peak Strategies, said of the Treasury settlements.

The Treasury said that Binance lacked an anti-money-laundering program and since its founding didn’t file a single suspicious activities report, or SAR, which flags potentially problematic transactions detected by the company to FinCEN. Binance also allegedly allowed transactions for wallets associated with terrorist groups, including Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda and Islamic State, according to the Treasury.

Read the full story and more from The Wall Street Journal.