Manhattan Prosecutors Probe Whether Binance Knowingly Allowed Iran-Linked Trading

Federal prosecutors are examining whether Binance violated US sanctions on Iran by allowing certain trades on its platform, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The Manhattan US attorney’s office is handling the review of the exchange’s compliance efforts, and the Justice Department’s criminal division in Washington is also involved, according to the report.

A Binance spokesperson told Bloomberg the company maintains “a zero-tolerance policy for sanctions violations” and fully cooperates with law enforcement. Which transactions prosecutors are examining has not been disclosed, and no charges have been filed.

Binance pleaded guilty in November 2023 to sanctions and anti-money-laundering violations, agreed to $4.3 billion in penalties and accepted two independent monitors reporting separately to the DOJ and FinCEN. Prosecutors said at the time that the platform had caused more than $898 million to be traded between US users and users in Iran between January 2018 and May 2022. A second criminal inquiry into the same category of conduct tests whether the compliance overhaul Binance built under that agreement actually works, at a moment when the company has been arguing for lighter oversight.

The probe follows a Sept. 14 civil forfeiture complaint in which the Southern District of New York sought more than $61 million in crypto allegedly generated by Iranian black-market oil sales and moved through Binance accounts by two Chinese companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale. Prosecutors described a wider network of addresses that handled more than $1.5 billion, and did not accuse Binance of wrongdoing in that complaint.

The Iran thread runs back to February, when Fortune reported that Binance had fired internal investigators who found more than $1 billion had flowed through the exchange to Iran-linked wallets between March 2024 and August 2025. The New York Times later put the figure at $1.7 billion tied to the same two Hong Kong entities, including addresses investigators linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Binance disputed the reporting and denied firing the investigators, and CEO Richard Teng said no sanctions violations were found. Senator Richard Blumenthal opened an inquiry that month, and the Treasury Department privately pressed the exchange in May to comply with its monitoring obligations.

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