DOJ Says Companies Used Binance To Funnel $1.5 Billion In Crypto To Iran

The US Department of Justice is accusing several companies of using the crypto exchange Binance to send money to Iran to fund its military, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Federal prosecutors disclosed Binance's alleged role in the scheme in a forfeiture complaint that looks to seize $61 million of cryptocurrency. In total, they say that around $1.5 billion was sent to the country via a series of interrelated digital wallets.

This scheme involves two Hong Kong-based companies called Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust, which acted as intermediaries to sell black-market Iranian oil to Chinese buyers. Binance itself confirmed this, as the company's internal investigators found that the two entities, among others, had moved heaps of money through the exchange to a network that was funding Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

The US Attorney's Office has said that the companies used "Binance to conduct cryptocurrency transactions representing the proceeds of black-market sales of Iranian oil to buyers in China." The complaint goes further and says that some of the money was sent through the US financial system before ending up in Iran. These transactions were allegedly designed to hide the original source of the funds.