In a lawsuit that reads like the collision point of geopolitics, crypto wealth, and digital shadows, hundreds of victims of the 2023 Hamas assault on Israel have taken aim at Binance, accusing the exchange of quietly opening the sluice gates for terror financing.
The newly public complaint alleges that the platform—long crowned the world’s largest crypto marketplace—served as a highway for covert money flows even after it admitted to U.S. violations and paid a multibillion-dollar penalty in 2023. The plaintiffs, more than 300 Americans tied to those killed, injured, or kidnapped in the October attacks and in violence that followed, say the exchange turned a blind eye while over a billion dollars surged through its ecosystem on behalf of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The filing recounts a pattern: vast crypto transfers passing through accounts that seemed wildly mismatched with the scale of the money moving through them. One striking example involved a young Venezuelan woman linked to a Brazilian livestock operation whose Binance account, opened in her mid-20s, allegedly saw deposits surpassing $177 million and withdrawals clearing $130 million. To the plaintiffs, this wasn’t just suspicious—it was symptomatic.
Central to the case is the contention that the platform was deliberately engineered as a sanctuary for illicit flows, a business model the plaintiffs argue remains unchanged even after its headline-making plea deal. The suit also revisits the history of the exchange’s founder, whose guilty plea over anti-money-laundering failures and brief prison stint ended with a presidential pardon last year.
Binance, for its part, declined to engage with the specifics of the lawsuit, offering only that it adheres to internationally recognized sanctions rules. Lawyers connected to related cases held a similar silence.
The suit, filed in federal court in North Dakota—a state the complaint notes was quietly touched by at least two suspicious crypto movements—seeks significant damages. Meanwhile, Binance and its founder are already facing another lawsuit in Manhattan, where a judge has allowed claims of a secretive funding corridor for militant groups to move forward.
What happens next could help define not only liability in this case, but how far the shadows of the crypto world will be allowed to stretch.
