The three members from Binance’s investigation team spoke about managing extortion, tax evasion, militant funding and bad press for the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Reuters as of late distributed a progression of insightful reports on Binance and its relationship with unlawful activity. It said that Binance has turned into a center for crime and that it disregarded a few tax evasion warnings.
Binance’s investigation team members – Gambaryan, Price and Poyraz – disputed a number of the claims, including allegations that Binance disproportionately facilitates more money-laundering than other exchanges and Binance has become a hotbed for criminality.
Gambaryan stated, “We operate in different jurisdictions. It makes our job challenging. That’s why we have to focus more on those jurisdictions [France, Italy, Dubai]. But us working in those jurisdictions allows law enforcement agencies to take action.”
From the experience of being a compliance officer, the main job is to explain to the business, including the CEO, what the risk and the problem is and to make a risk-based decision.
He continued, “I know for a fact that CZ has made decisions that have cost [Binance] a ton of money. We out-platformed accounts that had millions of users on it because of those risk-based decisions. Because it was the right thing to do. It cost billions of dollars, but he did it.”
Reuters alleged that several Iranian traders had accessed Binance from 2019 to 2021 before the exchange tightened its KYC process. As a part of the KYC Policy, Binance even announced a withdrawal limit for users that completed the basic level of their account verification process. Binance changed the new withdrawal limit from 2 BTC to 0.06 BTC.
However, according to Tigran Gambaryan, “I think we lost 90% of customers [of one entity that a Binance spokesperson says represented a sliver of exchange volume] from that user because not everybody came in to get KYC, and this cost us billions of dollars in revenue.”
Binance’s investigations team is presently led by Tigran Gambaryan and Matthew Price, ex-investigators of the U.S. Internal Revenue Services’ cybercrime unit.
The two men played prominent roles in taking down darknet markets AlphaBay, Silk Road and Hydra.
