In conjunction with what happened today [failure of some features on the platform], a report was issued on the CNBC website confirming that employees on Binance are providing solutions to Chinese users so that they can bypass KYC verification procedures, after analyzing chat messages published on some Telegram and Discord servers managed by Binance.
Crypto is banned in China, but Binance employees and support volunteers tell people how to bypass the banThe report states that more than 220,000 Chinese users have succeeded in verifying their accounts on Binance with the help of workers in the Binance support teams.
This is contrary not only to the laws of use on Binance, but also to the legislation of China, which has prohibited the activity of trading platforms since 2017 and banned cryptocurrencies since 2021.
Experts in financial regulation shared concern that Binance’s KYC and AML efforts can be so easily thwarted :
Wells Fargo anti-money-laundering executive Jim Richards agreed that the techniques for bypassing Binance’s KYC controls could have implications beyond China. “What about North Korean customers, or Russian customers, or Iranian customers?” Richards asked.
“If I had a eight out of 10 concern about Binance from a regulatory perspective and from a national security perspective, this takes it to a 10 out of 10,” Duke University professor and former FDIC Chief Innovation Officer Sultan Meghji told CNBC.
Meghji’s concerns about the laxity of Binance’s enforcement of KYC guidelines extend beyond China. “I think explicitly about the national security implications of how terrorists, criminals, money launderers, cyber people in North Korea, Russian oligarchs, etc., could use this to get access to this infrastructure,” he said, referring to some of the techniques described.
Source from the same article.