Binance sued by Hamas victims after Trump pardons crypto founder CZ

Dozens of families of the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel by Hamas sued Binance, alleging the top cryptocurrency trading platform knowingly helped transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in support of terrorist activities.

The lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in North Dakota came one month after President Donald Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to failing to combat money laundering on the crypto exchange.

Defendants Zhao, known as CZ, and close associate Guangying “Heina” Chen intentionally designed Binance “as a criminal enterprise to facilitate money laundering on a global scale,” the lawsuit alleges.

“Years before October 7, Binance knew that Hamas, the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran], Hezbollah, [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] and other terrorist organizations were all transacting regularly on its platform and nevertheless actively assisted their use of the platform,” the plaintiffs allege.

“It did so at a time when Hamas, in particular, was publicly directing its donors to send funds to so-called ‘crypto wallets’ held with Binance,” they allege.

The plaintiffs, who are U.S. nationals and their close family members, seek compensatory damages to be determined at trial. They are seeking “treble damages” under a law allowing victims of international terrorism to recover three times the damages they sustained.

Binance was legally required to flag the U.S. government by filing “Suspicious Activity Reports,” or SARs, on the terror groups’ activities. But instead, the company attempted to manipulate how the transactions were reported “to avoid attracting scrutiny,” the lawsuit alleges.

“Binance not only knowingly provided financial services to Hamas; it actively tried to shield its Hamas customers and their funds from scrutiny by U.S. regulators or law enforcement—a practice that continues to this day,” according to the lawsuit.

The legal complaint says that since the Oct. 7 attacks, Binance “knowingly facilitated the equivalent of more than $50 million U.S. dollars in transactions … for Hamas, the IRGC, Hezbollah, and PIJ on public blockchains.”

Binance declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said in a statement that it fully complies with international sanctions laws and has “executed a wide-ranging transformation” of its sanctions framework in recent years.

The suit cites the findings of the federal government’s investigations into Binance, which culminated in late 2023 with the company agreeing to pay more than $4.3 billion — one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time.

Additionally, then-CEO CZ agreed to step down and plead guilty to a…