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US Seeks More Than $4B from Binance to End Criminal Case
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoWhy would they even negotiate with the United States? It's like if I ran an online business from the US who happened to have customers in Indonesia and I was breaking Indonesian laws. As long as I never planned on going to Indonesia, why would I care? Fun fact: many years ago I did run an online business and I did break laws in other countries that I never plan to go to. I never broke US law.
- tw04 3y agoYou think he's safe living in Canada if he's found guilty for massive fraud in the US? Or you think China, who has also been cracking down on finance in their own country, is going to protect this nobody whose platform actively works against their financial controls?
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoI mentioned he's Canadian because he's not American. He doesn't live in Canada though and I think it's been a while since he has.
- Scoundreller 3y ago> whose platform actively works against their financial controls Depends on who is going against their financial controls. Obviously if you’re the right person, going around them is permitted. Just don’t be the wrong person going around them!
- toomuchtodo 3y agoYou may want to transit the airspace of the US or one of their allies in the future.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoThat is a good point.
- hiatus 3y agoI know Belarus has ordered at least one plane out of the sky for an arrest, but has the US?
- notyourwork 3y agoHas it? Who knows? Could it, yes. That is the point OP was making.
- robin_reala 3y agoOf course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
- Scoundreller 3y agoFrom what I’m reading, nobody ordered a plane out of the sky, but several countries (suddenly) excluded a plane from their sky. Of course, if you’re flying over a landlocked country, and every neighbour blocks you from their airspace, you don’t have many options. (Not that this quite happened, but looked to be going in that trajectory).
- joshuaissac 3y ago> nobody ordered a plane out of the sky, but several countries (suddenly) excluded a plane from their sky Suddenly withdrawing permission for a plane to fly through your sky, after it has already taken off and does not have enough fuel to take an alternative route, has the same effect as ordering it out of the sky.
- Scoundreller 3y agoWho said they didn’t have enough fuel for an alternative route? Their intended destination was Bolivia from Moscow. Can’t do that without a refuel ~midway. The next day they did a refuel in Canary Islands (Spain).
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoUSD is their biggest market.
- acdha 3y agoHow many countries and financial institutions will do business with someone the US government has put on a watchlist? Now consider that block chains are designed to make it easy for governments to control so even if I’m some guy in Nigeria my calculations for any transaction have to include a discount rate for the reduced number of people who will accept a transaction linked back to a sanctioned organization. Imagine how different the 1920s would have been if every bank, hotel, restaurant, etc. in Miami knew that the dollars you were paying came from a Cuban casino and were subject to criminal charges.
- rich_sasha 3y agohttps://archive.is/PPs7i/again?url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/us-seeks-more-than-4-billion-from-binance-to-end-criminal-case https://archive.is/PPs7i/again?url=https://www.bloomberg.com...
- monero-xmr 3y ago$80 billion in profit and a $4 billion fine! American justice at its finest.
- gruez 3y agoDid they really make $80 billion from the alleged wrongdoings? Or is that just their total profit?
- TrapLord_Rhodo 3y agoThe $80B in profit is a random number the OP through out. Most likely the exchange is making between $2-$4B in profit a year (With bull markets around $12-$14B a year). However, with such a small team and the team being paid is bUSD, i suspect most of their revenue is pure profit. Also, Binance executives are tied to Tether ($87B market cap) with around $8-12B in profit per year, and BNB ($39B market cap) $600-$800M per year, makes it one of the most profitable companies in the world. So although $80B came from no where (And the real number is closer to around $20B a year with a market cap of $110B, $4B is nothing for them.)
- chollida1 3y agoCan you explain how you came to that number?
- rich_sasha 3y agoI know this is how the US operates, still it's weird to trade cash for criminal allegations. Especially when Binance has been so vilified. I'm not defending Binance, rather, it feels like the SEC rhetoric went past the point where a fine is appropriate. Unless they are only proposing it so they can't be accused of not giving them the same treatment that everyone else gets.
- pavlov 3y agoIt seems like the deal would be more like probation where Binance would remain monitored after paying the fine: "If Binance and the DOJ agree on a deferred-prosecution-agreement, the Justice Department would file a criminal complaint against the company. The US would not go forward with a prosecution as long as the company meets prescribed conditions, which usually include paying a substantial penalty and agreeing to a detailed statement of facts outlining its wrongdoing. A process would be set up to monitor the company’s compliance." Also there might be personal criminal charges against CZ: "Negotiations between the Justice Department and Binance include the possibility that its founder Changpeng Zhao would face criminal charges in the US under an agreement to resolve the probe into alleged money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations, according to people familiar with the discussions. "Zhao, also known as “CZ,” is residing in the United Arab Emirates, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US, but that doesn’t prevent him from coming voluntarily." LOL at the "coming voluntarily" part though...
- inhumantsar 3y agoResiding in the UAE also wouldn't prevent extraordinary rendition should it come to that...
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoJust say kidnapping. It's not like it's North America's first time.
- arcticbull 3y agoNo need to go that far. The lack of an extradition treaty doesn’t preclude extradition. Instead of having a formalized process in place it would have to be done case by case. This is a common misconception about extradition treaties in general.
- costco 3y agoWow, I was expecting about half that. I think this would be the second largest DPA ever. BNP Paribas paid $9 billion, Airbus paid $3.9 billion, Wells Fargo $3 billion, ... I wonder if the SEC/CFTC stuff will be resolved too. That's the deal BitMEX got but this case is way more substantial than just not registering as a money transmitter.
- dmix 3y agoMaybe it's an opening bid that could be negotiated down to 50%. Half kidding.
- resolutebat 3y agoOr Binance could pay with BUSD stablecoins.
- ecommerceguy 3y ago4 billion and continue being an inflation sink (dollar destruction) and the deal with the US gov lets the scam continue.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> the deal with the US gov lets the scam continue Outside America. Which, like, seems fine.
- wmf 3y agoIt's not really though. US people log in to Binance through VPNs and get scammed.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> US people log in to Binance through VPNs and get scammed Literally the entire point of this case. DoJ seems to want CZ, personally, and for Binance to promise to root out Americans using it through a VPN. If they comply, the company can continue operating in others' markets while using the U.S. financial system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoSo, in the USA, you can do wrongs and then buy your way out of it, such that doing wrong and the resulting fines are just a cost of doing business however you see fit?
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoSounds like freedom to me :D
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> you can do wrongs and then buy your way out of it Did you miss the part where they're still wanting to criminally charge Zhao?
- 0xDEADFED5 3y agoI don't know why you're being downvoted, because the answer is mostly yes.
- Yizahi 3y agoAfter a certain threshold, financial crime is rebranded as "lobbying" and is rewarded instead of punished.
- sweezyjeezy 3y agoI feel you're going to have to do a bit more work to explain why this lobbying -> reward, vs. crime -> financial penalty, analogy makes sense.
- Yizahi 3y agoFinancial crime can't exist truly hidden in the modern world. Someone always know about it happening. So bribing those in the know is an integral part of the financial crime. And at certain scale bribes get to be renamed as lobbying, while being in essence the same bribes. Bribes are illegal, but lobbying is not, that's what the reward is. Corporation get to legalize their ill gotten money and have no problems with the law. You don't want to pay capital gains taxes, so you lobby that it is legal to separate obviously unified entity into on-shore bankrupt one, and off-shore profitable one in Ireland or whatever, bribed politicians make it a law and suddenly no taxes are required. You have a chicken farm for which you don't want to pay for extremely expensive utilization of the ill and dead birds, so you lobby to reduce some restrictions written in law and voila, now you can dump your dead birds at a common garbage dump. These are just some illustrative examples.
- purpleblue 3y agoAhhh, so I guess this really was just a shakedown after all, like some banana republic despot. Color me stupid for thinking that the US cared about law and order and not about making money through the justice system.
- gmerc 3y agoEverything continues to be legal for a fee’- and then we wonder the types of people we get