His criminal trial is likely to be in the fall. prosecutors and the SEC charged FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried with a host of money laundering, fraud and securities fraud charges in December.

The lawsuit comes roughly eight months after the collapse of FTX, which was also accused of co-mingling customers’ funds and investing the proceeds in high-risk investments that customers were unaware they were participating in.

“Unfortunately, the SEC’s refusal to productively engage with us is just another example of the Commission’s misguided and conscious refusal to provide much-needed clarity and guidance to the digital asset industry.” We intend to defend our platform vigorously,” the company said in a Twitter post. “While we take the SEC’s allegations seriously, they should not be the subject of an SEC enforcement action, let alone on an emergency basis. In a social media post, Binance said that it has been cooperating with the SEC’s investigation but said that the agency “chose to act unilaterally and litigate.” READ MORE: Amid value drops and increased regulation, what’s the future of cryptocurrency? “The public should beware of investing any of their hard-earned assets with or on these unlawful platforms,” Gensler said. SEC Chair Gary Gensler in a written statement that Zhao and Binance “engaged in an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law.” The lawsuit lays out the extent to which the firms owners knew of the alleged legal violations: “Binance’s CCO bluntly admitted to another Binance compliance officer in December 2018, “we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.” District Court for the District of Columbia, the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit on Monday lists thirteen charges against the firm - including commingling and diverting customer assets to an entity Zhao owned called Sigma Chain.īinance is a Cayman Islands limited liability company founded by Zhao and the charges are familiar to practices uncovered after the collapse of the second largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, last year. securities laws in a lawsuit filed by the SEC.įiled in the U.S. WASHINGTON (AP) - The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao are accused of misusing investor funds, operating as an unregistered exchange and violating a slew of U.S.

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