(Reuters) – Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former chief executive of Binance, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, was sentenced to four months in prison on Tuesday for violating anti-money laundering laws in the United States, charges to which he pleaded guilty.
The sentence was set in Seattle by District Judge Richard Jones, who rejected prosecutors’ request for a three-year prison term.
According to US authorities, Binance failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions with terrorist groups such as Hamas, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. The platform would also have allowed the sale of child pornography and the transit of part of the funds extorted via ‘ransomware’.
Changpeng Zhao, once considered the most important person in the cryptocurrency industry, agreed as part of the legal proceedings to leave his post at the head of Binance, which he founded in 2017.
(Chris Prentice, Jonathan Stempel and Luc Cohen in New York; French version Jean Terzian)
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