Binance is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, handling $490 billion of spot trading volumes in March 2022.
Akio Kon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume and assets, processing $9.5 trillion worth of trades in 2021 alone. But it’s not supposed to be allowed to operate in China, which banned cryptocurrency trading in 2021.
Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has touted the exchange’s know-your-customer systems, known as KYC, as a billion-dollar effort. Among other functions, they are supposed to stop customers that aren’t supposed to be on the platform, including residents of China.
But customers in China and around the world regularly subvert Binance’s controls to hide their country of residence or origin, messages in Binance’s official Chinese-language chatrooms show.
CNBC obtained, translated and reviewed hundreds of messages from a Discord server and Telegram group which are controlled and operated by Binance. More than 220,000 users were registered across both groups, which were freely accessible to anyone who registered and joined. Until late March, there were no controls on access, which is how CNBC was able to review messages from 2021 to 2023.
The messages CNBC reviewed come from accounts identified as Binance employees or Binance-trained volunteers known as “Angels.” In these messages, they shared techniques that can be used to evade Binance’s KYC, residency, and verification systems.
Some of the techniques that employees and volunteers have shared involve forging bank documents or offering false addresses. Others involve simple manipulation of Binance’s systems.
Employees, volunteers, and customers also shared video guides and documents that showed mainland residents how to falsify their country of residence in order to obtain Binance’s debit card, which would effectively turn their Binance crypto into a conventional checking account.
Whatever the method, Binance’s Chinese users take on a significant risk: In China, crypto exchanges have been outlawed since 2017, while crypto itself was outlawed in 2021. Many of the products that Chinese residents seek access to are also illegal under Chinese law.
The techniques shared with and among customers also call into question the effectiveness of Binance’s anti-money laundering efforts. For international businesses like Binance, KYC and anti-money laundering efforts are critical in ensuring customers aren’t engaged in illegal activity, like terrorism or fraud.
Experts in financial regulation shared concern that Binance’s KYC and AML efforts can be so easily thwarted.
“If I had a eight out of 10 concern about Binance from a regulatory perspective and from a national security perspective, this takes it to a 10 out of 10,” Duke University professor and former FDIC chief innovation officer Sultan Meghji told CNBC.
Meghji’s concerns about the laxity of Binance’s enforcement of KYC guidelines extend beyond China. “I think explicitly about the national security implications of how terrorists, criminals, money launderers, cyber people in North Korea, Russian oligarchs, et cetera, could use this to get access to this infrastructure,” he said, referring to some of the techniques described.
Wells Fargo anti-money laundering executive Jim Richards agreed that the techniques for bypassing Binance’s KYC controls could have implications beyond China. “What about North Korean customers, or Russian customers, or Iranian customers?” Richards asked.
When reached for comment on the findings in this article, a Binance spokesperson told CNBC, “We have taken action against employees who may have violated our internal policies including wrongly soliciting or making recommendations that are not allowed or in line with our standards. We have strict policies requiring all users to pass KYC by providing us with their country of residence and other personal identification information.”
The spokesperson added, “Binance employees are explicitly forbidden from suggesting or supporting users in circumventing their local laws and regulatory policies, and would be immediately dismissed or audited if found to have violated those policies.”
CNBC also reached out to the Binance employees and Angels named in this article. One told CNBC to contact Binance’s PR team. The rest did not reply.
Public compliance, private evasion
In 2021, after China banned cryptocurrency, Bloomberg reported that Binance had stopped letting Chinese mobile phone numbers register. The company told Bloomberg that it had blocked Chinese IP addresses as well.
But Chinese customers have continued to seek ways to trade on Binance, which include using instructions provided by employees and volunteers. In some cases, these instructions rely on virtual private networks, or VPNs, software that can disguise the user’s location and send messages through the Chinese Internet firewall.
In May 2022, in a support channel on Binance’s Discord server, a user asked “How can mainland users register now?”
A person using the handle Yaya and identifying as a Binance employee told them to activate their VPN and register as a Taiwanese resident, then switch their nationality back to China. The employee also suggested avoiding using VPN nodes in the “United States, Singapore, and Hong Kong.” Binance officially restricts access to certain products in those countries.
Messages obtained by CNBC from Binance’s Chinese-language Discord server.
CNBC
User #1: How can mainland users register now? yaya.z: [How to register for mainland clients]: Clients need to use a VPN that excludes IP addresses from restricted regions such as the United States, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Then use overseas email (Outlook, Gmail, ProtonMail) to register. Please choose Taiwan as a place of residence; then switch back to China at the authentication phase, then upload the mainland ID card.
There are steps that exchanges can and should take to prevent VPN use, said Neel Maitra, a partner at law firm Wilson Sonsini and a former SEC senior special counsel for cryptocurrency issues.
“Most best practices by exchanges also account for common evasive behaviors,” Maitra told CNBC. “While it is true an exchange cannot necessarily prevent or effectively police all possible forms of evasion, I think most regulators would require that they police against the most common evasive forms.”
Binance told CNBC it had implemented “advanced detection tools” to root out users in “restricted and sanctioned regions that had access to sophisticated masking tools including VPNs.”
In other cases, the advice does not rely on a VPN.
In Dec. 2022, a person with the handle Stella, who was identified as a Binance community manager in the company’s online marketing materials, posted messages in a server-wide announcement channel, explaining how people could use a specialized “VPN-free” domain name and download an app which appears to be specifically tailored for customers in mainland China to use Binance services.
CNBC was provided the link to this app from an email address with a binance.com domain. A reporter was able to download the app from a location within China without a VPN, and register using a Chinese phone number. The app is hosted on Tencent, which offers a cloud computing service popular within China, and offers the ability to purchase crypto from other Binance customers in prices denominated in Chinese yuan, using the popular Chinese apps WeChat or Alipay. It also has options to submit Chinese identity documents for KYC verification.
Binance told CNBC it does not offer a specialized version of its app for Chinese customers. “‘Binance does not offer a ‘Binance Chinese Android app,” a spokesperson said. “There is only one official Binance app.”
More often, employees appear to refer questions about KYC to Binance Angels, creating a gap between the company and potential regulatory violations, messages reviewed by CNBC show. Binance has emphasized that Angels “are not representatives of Binance.”
“Our role is limited, and we do not speak on Binance’s behalf,” an Angel said in a Binance blog post.
But Binance’s Chinese-language Angels go through a separate training process that takes up to a year, according to a Binance hiring page. They’re vetted, trained, and deployed across Binance’s Telegram and Discord groups, operating under the supervision of Binance employees.
In one Oct. 2022 exchange reviewed by CNBC, an Angel advised a user who was having trouble accessing the specialized Binance websites that were supposed to work within mainland China.
That Angel told the user to switch their VPN to a different region and try again.
“How do users in mainland China register their accounts?” another user asked in a Mar. 2022 message.
“Register with an overseas email address,” the same Angel responded, before telling the user to pick Taiwan as their residence.
That volunteer offered similar guidance to other customers. In Apr. 2022, another purported mainland China resident asked “What could I do if proof of residence is required? Can I change my place of residence?”
“Proof of registered residence is not required,” this Angel responded.
In another case, a purported mainland resident worried about uploading their Chinese identity documents, messages from March 2022 show. The same Angel reassured the user they could claim to be in Taiwan but still submit a Chinese identity card, and Binance wouldn’t stop them.
“[Binance] doesn’t do business on the mainland, but it can’t stop mainland users from bypassing the great firewall to play,” the Angel assured the user.
Angels also teach users about the exchange’s offerings, best practices, and the blockchain.
In one question-and-answer lesson from Apr. 2022, two Binance Angels showed Chinese users how they could participate in Launchpad, Binance’s IPO-like product for new crypto tokens.
Chinese residents are prohibited from participating in initial exchange offerings under Chinese laws, including a specific ban on initial coin offerings.
“How do mainland users participate in Launchpad?” the Angel leading the session asked, rhetorically.
Several users said it was impossible.
But other participants in the Q&A, including a different Angel, said registering a foreign company or with foreign KYC would let mainland users sidestep Binance’s controls.
“Congratulations to this top student,” the session-leading Angel responded to the user who answered “overseas company” the fastest.
In comment to CNBC about the findings in this article, Binance reiterated that the Angels are not employees.
“Binance Angel Program is a community ambassador program, no different than the community ambassadors that operate on other platforms like Wikipedia and Reddit. Binance Angels are not given access to Binance equipment or Binance internal systems, nor do they have the authority to speak for Binance. Binance Angels are forbidden from sharing recommendations that are against our company policies or the law and would be immediately removed from the Binance Angel Program if they were found doing so.”
The Palau dodge
Palau launched its digital residency program in 2022 in an effort to modernize physical identity cards, rolling out an NFT-linked identity card that’s available for a few hundred U.S. dollars annually.
In a 2022 visit to the archipelago, Zhao called it a “very innovative” effort.
But Palau’s program also lets users around the world access Binance using their Palau “residency” to hide their country of citizenship and residency.
Customers openly referred to Palau’s program as a way to sidestep Binance’s country-specific controls, according to Telegram and Discord messages CNBC reviewed.
When users asked how to access products and currencies otherwise unavailable to Chinese residents, Angels guided them to an Oct. 2022 tweet from a handle that belongs to a Binance client relationship manager, according to a Binance customer who worked with them. That tweet, which has since been deleted, linked to a third-party Mandarin YouTube guide on using the Palau residency to pass Binance’s European Union KYC controls, even if the user lived outside the EU.
“Passing” allowed users to apply for Binance’s restricted Visa debit card, which lets them turn their crypto into fiat currency for use anywhere. (Visa declined to provide comment for this story.)
Specifically, the third-party video walks users through how to register with Palau, purchase the Palau ID, and upload the ID to Binance’s exchange. It then shows a user how to create a placeholder mail-forwarding Austrian address. Then, it offers an apparently genuine bank statement from the video creator’s German bank account, and explains how to modify the bank statement to include the Austrian address. Forging the bank statement takes nothing more than a PDF editor, according to the video’s creator.
In Nov. 2022, one user who said they were in mainland China inquired about the Binance Card, messages from the Discord server show. An Angel directed them to the video, and suggested it would help them get it.
In comment to CNBC, Binance says it did not have any part in creating the video guide. “That video is not a Binance-owned piece of content, nor is the content creator a Binance employee or even a Binance Angel.”
The technique of using fake Austrian credentials was well-known enough to be discussed in other chats in Nov. and Dec. 2022, although some of these chats did not make specific reference to this video.
One Binance employee warned an applicant not to apply for the Binance debit card “casually,” noting, “Some users said their accounts were banned after attempts to change their addresses to unauthorized countries.”
The customer reassured the Binance employee that they had used Austrian bank statements.
Similarly, in Dec. 2022 messages on Binance’s Chinese-language Telegram group, users complained that they couldn’t get a Binance debit card.
“If you are Chinese, you can’t,” one user said.
Another user guided them to a different video that used the same false proof-of-address and took advantage of an account from the same German bank.
“What if you can’t produce the relevant documents?” the creator of this second video asked rhetorically. “You can join my Telegram group. Someone in my group provides this service which can help you customize this address certificate.”
Or, the creator continued, mainland users could obtain “proof of address” or “overseas professional customization” on Taobao, a Chinese marketplace.
Regulatory and compliance experts told CNBC they were alarmed by how easily Binance users were able to fake KYC credentials.
“I’m sitting at main Justice, or the National Security Council, I get very concerned hearing this. If I’m sitting at the IRS, I get very concerned about this,” Meghji told CNBC.
Richards told CNBC that any unauthorized access to Binance would concern the exchange’s traditional financial partners, from Visa to a customer’s bank. If a user tried to withdraw funds from Binance into a JP Morgan Chase checking account, for example, it might cause some concern.
“Chase would look at the source of funds and see that they’re coming from Binance,” Richards said. “And if they know that Binance is suspect, then the source of funds could be seen as suspect.”
CNBC asked Binance for comment on the substance of all the reporting in this article, and shared several specific posts and messages in the process. All of those messages and posts, including the Binance employee’s Tweet sharing the how-to video, were deleted after CNBC provided them to Binance.
In addition, hours after Binance responded to CNBC, messages apeared on Twitter suggesting that some customers’ Binance debit cards had been frozen.
“Why is my Binance card frozen?” the customer asked in Chinese.
The employee told the customer to take their concerns to Binance’s banking partner.
“How do Binance applicants know which bank is issuing the card?” the user retorted.
A jury in Miami has determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, and must compensate the family of the deceased and an injured survivor a portion of $329 million in damages.
Tesla’s payout is based on $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages against the company.
The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages. In cases like these, punitive damages are typically capped at three times compensatory damages.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys told CNBC on Friday that because punitive damages were only assessed against Tesla, they expect the automaker to pay the full $200 million, bringing total payments to around $242.5 million.
Tesla said it plans to appeal the decision.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs had asked the jury to award damages based on $345 million in total damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.
The suit centered around who shouldered the blame for the deadly crash in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.
While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.
Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.
“Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm’s way.”
Following the verdict, the plaintiffs’ families hugged each other and their lawyers, and Angulo was “visibly emotional” as he embraced his mother, according to NBC.
Here is Tesla’s response to CNBC:
“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.
Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which overrode Autopilot – as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash.
This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility.”
The verdict comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that his company can pivot into a leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.
Tesla shares dipped 1.8% on Friday and are now down 25% for the year, the biggest drop among tech’s megacap companies.
The verdict could set a precedent for Autopilot-related suits against Tesla. About a dozen active cases are underway focused on similar claims involving incidents where Autopilot or Tesla’s FSD— Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — had been in use just before a fatal or injurious crash.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiated a probe in 2021 into possible safety defects in Tesla’s Autopilot systems. During the course of that investigation, Tesla made changes, including a number of over-the-air software updates.
The agency then opened a second probe, which is ongoing, evaluating whether Tesla’s “recall remedy” to resolve issues with the behavior of its Autopilot, especially around stationary first responder vehicles, had been effective.
The NHTSA has also warned Tesla that its social media posts may mislead drivers into thinking its cars are capable of functioning as robotaxis, even though owners manuals say the cars require hands-on steering and a driver attentive to steering and braking at all times.
A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions, TeslaDeaths.com, has reported at least 58 deaths resulting from incidents where Tesla drivers had Autopilot engaged just before impact.
A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025.
Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.
The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.
The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.
Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.
Stock Chart IconStock chart icon
Bitcoin falls below $115,000
The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.
“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”
Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.
Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.
The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.
The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.
In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.
“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.
Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids.
The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”
Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.
“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.
One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.
Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.