A U.S. court dismisses a lawsuit brought by terror victims and their relatives.
A U.S. court has dismissed a terrorism lawsuit against the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading exchange, Binance, filed by victims and relatives of 64 terror attacks.
The 535 plaintiffs are the victims and relatives of victims of terror attacks carried out by groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) between 2016 and 2024.
The lawsuit claimed that Binance deliberately violated sanctions and anti-money laundering (AML)/countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) norms which effectively led to hundreds of millions of dollars getting poured into the coffers of terror groups.
The defendants were Binance, founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, and Binance.US operator BAM Trading.
Binance Co-Founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao delivers a speech at the opening event of Europe’s largest tech conference, the Web Summit, in Lisbon on November 1, 2022.
But Judge Jeannette A. Vargas at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissedthe lawsuit on March 6, ruling that the plaintiffs failed to plausibly demonstrate that Binance’s conduct aided specific terror attacks.
Though the plaintiffs adequately argued that Binance was “generally aware” of its role in terror financing due to its well-documented history of violating AML/CFT rules and knowingly hosting wallets tied to designated terror groups, the judge said. But she added that awareness alone wasn’t sufficient under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which also requires that the plaintiffs help launder funds with the intent to aid the terror attacks.
The judge concluded the allegations didn’t connect Binance’s acts to the specific terror attacks. However, she gave a 60-day deadline to the plaintiffs to file an amendment to their suit in which they should mention specific wallet
ownerships and transaction dates and try to establish the links between specific accounts and the terror attacks.
