Survivors of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks — including victims of the Nova music festival massacre and the wife of an Israeli currently held captive in Gaza — have sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, over accusations it gave “material support” to the terror group by allowing it to fundraise on its platform.
The crypto firm’s financial support of Hamas’ deadly rampage — which left 1,200 dead, 250 kidnapped, numerous women raped and nearly 7,000 wounded — “cannot be overstated,” according to the civil suit filed by lawyers working with the National Jewish Advocacy Center in the US Middle District of Alabama.
Binance facilitated nearly $900 million in transactions between US customers and Iran in violation of US sanctions from January 2018 to May 2022, according to the DOJ – Iran is a known funder of terror groups.
“A lot of that money went to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda, and ISIS,” one of the survivors’ lawyers, Mark Golfeder, told The Post, “Binance has blood on its hands.”
Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a felony charge and paid a $50 million fine in November. The crypto firm paid a whopping $4.3 billion settlement after the company was found to have violated US sanctions and failed to prevent money laundering on its exchange.
“Everything we are alleging are things [Binance] has already admitted to,” Golfeder said.
According to the new lawsuit, Binance engaged in 1.5 million trades that violated US sanctions, and the crypto firm was found to have “willfully failed to report” over 100,000 suspicious transactions.
“Binance and its affiliated companies for years knowingly and intentionally provided material support to Hamas and other vile terrorist organizations by facilitating their movement of funds,” lead attorney for the case David Schoen said in a statement.
Though it is difficult to trace exactly how much money terrorist groups raised from Binance, a Wall Street Journal report found that Palestinian Islamic Jihad made $93 million from crypto between August 2021-June 2023 and Hamas raised $41 million over a similar span of time.
The plaintiffs — Adin Gess, Noach Newman, Maya Parizer, Natalie Sanandaji, Yoni Diller, and Hadar Almog, Lishay Lavi, David Bromberg, and Ariel Ein-Gal — are pushing for a jury trial which they hope will award damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars and force the crypto firm to establish a general survivors and hostages fund for the victims of the Hamas attacks.
Federal investigators found that Binance was well aware their platform was being used to raise funds by Hamas, with an employee saying in an internal communication “we see the bad but we close 2 eyes.”
“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 L. Yellen said in a statement.
Other employees were found to be even more cavalier about Hamas and other terrorist groups using Binance’s platform to raise money.
A CTFC complaint found that after former Binance Chief Compliance Officer Samuel Lim – who later paid a $1.5 million penalty for violating the Commodity Exchange Act – explained that terrorists would use their platform for small transactions because anything above $600 constituted money laundering, a colleague replied that Hamas could “barely buy an AK 47 with 600 bucks.”
A Binance compliance employee even once joked that the company’s slogan should be “Is washing drug money too hard these days? Come to Binance we got cake for you,” according to the DOJ.
Ex-CEO Zhao who is out on $175 million bond and awaiting sentencing, told employees that it was “better to ask forgiveness than permission.”
Plaintiff Adin Gess, who was not home at the time of Hamas’ savage attack, watched as the terrorist group slaughtered his friends and neighbors in Kibbutz Holit on WhatsApp on Oct. 7 and says he is “shocked by [Binance’s] callous indifference.”
“They knew where the money was going, they knew what Hamas was capable of. My friends are dead in part because these people purposefully gave the bad guys money,” Gess told The Post.
The plaintiffs wish to “draw a line in the sand” with this lawsuit and send a message that companies cannot “flagrantly violate the law, hurt other people and laugh all the way to the bank,” Gess said.
“My family has been through hell, and [Binance] contributed to that suffering… they hurt thousands of individuals,” Gess told The Post.
Binance has not responded to The Post’s request for comment.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
