Cryptocurrency platform Binance was sued for facilitating Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad funding and financial transactions by the victims of the October 7 massacre, according to a filing to the District Court for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division on Monday.
The nine plaintiffs sought damages from Binance, its affiliates, subsidiaries, and CEO Changpeng Zhao pursuant to the Antiterrorism Act and Alien Tort Statute for aiding, abetting, and knowingly providing material support and resources to the two US-designated foreign terrorist organizations.
David Schoen, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said that the largest virtual currency exchange “knowingly and intentionally provided material support to Hamas and other vile terrorist organizations by facilitating their movement of funds. Schoen argued that “Binance used sophisticated manipulations to conceal the terrorists’ transactions. Our federal government secured criminal convictions for the company and its CEO, but now Binance must be held directly accountable to its victims.”
Binance financial settlement
In November, Binance settled with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and IRS Criminal Investigation for violations of US anti-money laundering laws and sanctions.
In what the US treasury called the largest settlement in history, Binance would have to pay penalties of $3.4 billion to FinCEN and $968 million to OFAC for failing to prevent and report suspicious transactions with terrorist organizations including Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, PIJ, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and facilitating cryptocurrency trades between US users and Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea region of Ukraine.
“Binance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profit. Its willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said on November 21.
According to a 2021 Coindesk analysis, Hamas received up to $100,000 in bitcoin since the beginning of 2021. It said that the transactions increased during May’s Operation Guardian of the Walls.
further attacks against Binance
Ben Schlager, Senior Counsel at Goldfeder & Terry, said, “Illicit remittances knowingly facilitated by Binance provided the necessary material support, military and tactical enablement, and acquisition capacity necessary for Hamas to train for and to carry out terrorist activities, including the complex, multipronged and highly sophisticated attack against civilians in Israel on October 7.”
Arsen Ostrovsky, Attorney and CEO of The International Legal Forum, which is working with the National Jewish Advocacy Center to aid the victims in the case, said that Binance’s platform helped the terrorist organizations fundraise for atrocities.
American-Israeli plaintiff Noach Newman’s brother was killed during the Hamas attack on the Supernova festival, an event that several other plaintiffs, like American David Bromberg, survived and were seeking damages for the suffering and trauma that they endured. Israeli Lishay Lavi’s husband Omri Miran was kidnapped at the couple’s Nachal Oz home. Other plaintiffs like Hagar Almog were forced to evacuate and had their lives upended by the pogrom.