Binance in the sights of the US tax authority IRS

According to media reports, the US Department of Justice and the Federal Tax Service IRS are currently investigating crypto money launderers. To do this, they work with the Bitcoin exchange Binance.

The largest Bitcoin exchange in the world is apparently in the sights of the US tax authority IRS. The reported the news portal Bloomberg Tax citing an anonymous source. After that, officials from the IRS and the U.S. Department of Justice have requested information from anyone who has insight into the business of Binance Holdings, Binance’s parent company. The background to the investigation is the suspicion that criminals are using the Exchange for money laundering.

Binance emphasizes willingness to cooperate

Binance spokeswoman Jessica Jung signaled opposite Bloomberg the willingness of the Exchange to cooperate with the authorities. In addition, Jung refers to the precautions that Binance has already taken to combat financial crime.

We take our legal obligations very seriously and work with regulators and law enforcement agencies. We have worked hard to build a robust compliance program that includes anti-money laundering principles and tools used by financial institutions to detect and address suspicious activity.

In the meantime, Binance boss Changpeng Zhao has also commented on the report. Zhao also emphasizes Binance’s willingness to cooperate – and criticizes the choice of words in the heading of the Bloomberg article.

The “News” title is bad. The article itself is actually not that bad (but who’s reading it). He describes how @binance is working with law enforcement to tackle black sheep, but somehow he makes it look like a bad thing … whatever. Back to work.

Binance CEO Zhao via Twitter

BaFin is also dealing with Binance

Meanwhile, with the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, the German market watchdogs recently scrutinized the Bitcoin exchange behemoth. Specifically, it is about the controversial share tokens that Binance recently introduced. These are crypto tokens that track the share prices of companies. For BaFin, this means that the fine line to security has been exceeded. At the end of April, the authority published a consumer notice with the “reasonable suspicion” that Binance should have prepared a securities prospectus for its stock tokens – as is mandatory for the public offering of traditional securities. Here, too, the Bitcoin exchange has emphasized its willingness to cooperate with regulatory authorities.

BNB course gets a damper

The recent strong price of the in-house utility token, the Binance Coin (BNB), has suffered a damper after the IRS investigations became known. However, BNB was in good company, because at the same time almost the entire crypto market crashed, which is largely associated with the Bitcoin scolding by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

At press time, BNB, which only hit an all-time high of $ 686 on May 10, is trading at $ 598. In a 24-hour comparison, BNB has to give up 8.5 percentage points.