During a keynote on Thursday at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2023 conference, a top compliance employee claimed that Binance has discovered a way to keep North Koreans away from its cryptocurrency exchange.
Tigran Gambaryan, head of financial crime compliance at the biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, claimed that they got enough kicked in the ass to realise that Binance was not the place for them. Whether it’s detecting the many entities or sorts of identity that they try to spoof, or circumventing controls, Binance has been largely successful.
By describing how his 700-member compliance team responds to 1,300 law enforcement requests each week, Gambaryan highlighted the exchange’s efforts.
Three North Koreans were prohibited earlier this week by the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions office for their involvement with the Lazarus Group, a North Korean cyber group infamous for cryptocurrency thefts.
In September 2021, Binance hired Gambaryan, a former special agent at the Internal Revenue Service who oversaw multibillion-dollar cyber investigations (including the infamous Silk Road case), as a result of the statistical likelihood that Binance will be exploited by criminal actors.
The creator of the exchange Changpeng Zhao, Binance, and other parties were sued by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) late last month. The corporation is accused of trying to skirt U.S. restrictions by failing to register as a “futures commission merchant” and selling unregistered crypto derivatives to American clients.
This week, the U.S. division of Binance not only ended its agreement to buy the assets of the insolvent cryptocurrency lender Voyager Digital, citing the “hostile and uncertain regulatory climate in the United States” as justification, but also covertly lifted restrictions on Russian residents and nationalities.
Gambaryan stated that he was still concerned about nation-state bad actors and pig butchering schemes, in which con artists trick people into investing little sums of money gradually into cryptocurrencies before stealing them and fattening the pig before butchering it.
