Binance Faces Its Worst Scandal Yet, Even After Trump’s Pardon

In late 2023, Binance and CZ pleaded guilty to serious U.S. federal charges.

The company admitted it failed to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering (AML) program. Because of that failure, U.S. prosecutors said Binance “turned a blind eye,” and that illegal transactions for terrorists, cyber-criminals, even child-sex abusers had flowed through the platform.

At sentencing, the scale of what $4.3 billion meant came into sharp focus. Binance agreed to pay roughly $4.3 billion in fines, one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history. CZ personally was fined $50 million and got a four-month prison sentence.

After the guilty plea, CZ resigned as CEO. The U.S. government, including the Treasury Department, was blunt: Binance’s failures “allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers.”

Internal messages from Binance staff were part of the evidence. At one point, an employee allegedly joked: “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days, come to binance we got cake for you.’”

That’s not corporate hyperbole; that’s a red flag, waved high.

New Accusations: “Aiding Terrorists,” After the Pardon

Then in late November 2025. Families of victims from the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel filed a major new lawsuit against Binance and against CZ individually.

They allege Binance facilitated over $1 billion in crypto transfers to the U.S.-designated terror groups: Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and even Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

According to the complaint, more than $300 million flowed from Binance-controlled wallets to terror-linked addresses before the attack, and $50 million (or more) was transferred after, with an additional $115 million reportedly moved post-attack.

Lawyers representing the victims said: “Binance ensured that terrorists and other criminals could deposit and shuffle enormous sums on the exchange with impunity.” They claim many of those suspect accounts remain active.

If true, that ain’t just negligent compliance. That’s willful facilitation.

On its side, Binance has strongly denied the allegations. The exchange said it follows international sanctions and argued that cryptocurrency is not widely used by Hamas.

But that denial isn’t calming many: the claims are detailed, backed by blockchain-transaction records, and coming at precisely the wrong time for Binance’s public image.

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Donald Trump’s Pardon of Binance And Big Questions

In October 2025, President Trump pardoned CZ.

Trump, when asked in a televised interview why he’d pardon someone convicted of enabling money laundering for criminals and terrorists, said: “I don’t know who he is.” He claimed he’d only been told that CZ was a victim of a “witch hunt” by the prior administration.

In an interview, he said, “But this man was treated really badly by the Biden administration,” Trump said. “And he was given a jail term. He’s highly respected. He’s a very successful guy. They sent him to jail, and they really set him up. That’s my opinion. I was told about it. … I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.”

From the White House: the pardon, they argued, was about fairness. As a spokesperson said, Trump used his constitutional power to correct a perceived excess of political prosecution.

For Binance, the pardon was framed as a “huge win.” The company issued a statement thanking Trump for “his leadership” and for making America “the crypto capital of the world.” CZ himself, in a post on X, said he was “deeply grateful” and pledged to help “make America the Capital of Crypto.”

But not everyone celebrated. Oversight groups and dozens of U.S. lawmakers voiced outrage. For example, Sean Casten led a letter signed by 27 House Democrats condemning the pardon as a “culture of enabling cryptocurrency crime to increase company profits.”

Many see the pardon as more than forgiveness: as a political move with possible conflicts of interest, especially given the financial ties between Binance, CZ, and another crypto venture co-owned by the Trump family.

Why This Means 

If you pause for a second and think about what’s unfolding, it hits at multiple levels:

• For victims: the families suing Binance claim their pain is real. Lives lost, families torn apart, and they point to specific transactions they say funded the violence. This isn’t just a legal drama. It’s deeply personal.
• For crypto regulation & global safety: If exchanges can, even once, allow wallets tied to terror groups to operate and if they’re later pardoned, what does that say about accountability? About deterrence? About the credibility of compliance programs?
• For trust in institutions, whether crypto firms or governments: A federal guilty plea, a record-setting fine, months of prison, and then a pardon? That’s not exactly inspiring confidence. Some will see it as “justice served,” others as favoritism at scale.

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What to Watch Out For

• The new lawsuit from the October 7 victims, the one alleging more than $1 billion in terrorist-linked transfers, could expose even more internal documents, communications, and chain-of-custody flaws at Binance. It could be explosive.
• We may see pressure from U.S. lawmakers on regulators: calls for renewed investigations, stronger sanctions, maybe even new laws targeting crypto-exchange liabilities.
• For Binance (and for crypto broadly): public trust is fragile. If the allegations are proven, crypto firms may face problems as many may demand a level of transparency and compliance that some in crypto resist.
• And on the political side, the pardon might increase scrutiny over how pardons are used, especially with billion-dollar industries and global risks at play.