The clues started emerging in November 2024, a trail of evidence that pointed to possible financial crimes involving a vendor for Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Some clues were in plain sight, found in public business records in Singapore and Hong Kong, on a U.S. trade blacklist, and in Binance transaction logs that showed hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the account of a 78-year-old Chinese man. They led to Blessed Trust, a little-known payment processing firm that handled back-office tasks for Binance while using the exchange to move $1.2 billion that ultimately went to Iranian entities, according to company records and other documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Binance has more than 1,500 employees to help monitor the platform for potential criminal activity, a crucial task for financial firms, especially when vast sums change hands. But the company did not end its relationship with Blessed Trust until January, about a year after warning signs showed up in public records, The Times found.
That was when Binance acted on findings from its compliance investigators that $1.7 billion had moved from Blessed Trust and another Binance account to a cluster of entities linked to Iran, a possible violation of U.S. sanctions. Last month, The Times and others reported that the company had fired or suspended the investigators who discovered the Blessed Trust transactions. Binance cited “unauthorized disclosure” of client data as the basis for the discipline.