Binance Denies Slowing US Crypto Investigations Amid MLAT Policy Shifts

Woofun AI reports that a fundamental disagreement has emerged regarding the speed and mechanism of asset preservation in cross-border crypto cases, centering on whether Binance restricts accounts during the preparation of legal paperwork or insists on completing full procedural requirements first. The New York Times published a report today describing a Binance policy, adopted in April 2025, that directs most foreign law-enforcement requests through the Emirati government and Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) channels.

European investigators and US prosecutors are described in the report as saying the arrangement makes it harder to trace scammers, pursue money laundering and freeze assets quickly. Binance continues to respond directly in cases involving child sexual abuse material, terrorism or an imminent threat to life. A Binance spokesperson told CoinDesk the company has not slowed its cooperation with global law enforcement and has increased it year over year while navigating growing complexity in how governments approach crypto regulation and data access.

The US complaint surfaced three weeks earlier. An internal Justice Department memo described by The Information on July 8 warned prosecutors to expect less assistance from the exchange in crypto cases. According to that account, the memo said Binance would stop providing "courtesy freezes" from June 8 and require applications to pass through MLAT procedures instead. Binance says it has not seen the memo, does not dispute that it exists and rejects its characterisation.

A courtesy freeze is a voluntary, temporary restriction placed on an account while authorities prepare the documents required for a longer hold or seizure. It does not transfer ownership or replace a court order. Its value is entirely in timing. The Information reported that the memo expected Binance to require both a seizure warrant and an MLAT application to the relevant Binance entity or the United Arab Emirates for some federal seizure cases. State and local authorities could face the same government-to-government route for records, freezes and seizures.

An MLAT allows one country to ask another for evidence or enforcement assistance in a criminal case. These submissions pass through central government authorities and may require review by prosecutors or courts in the receiving jurisdiction, a process measured in weeks or months. Binance says nothing has changed in how it works with US law enforcement. Its communications team told BeInCrypto that prosecutors likely misread the company’s obligations under the licence it holds through Abu Dhabi Global Market, and that Binance is in direct contact with the department to correct the record.

A licence condition requiring treaty channels for foreign data requests would produce exactly the effect prosecutors described, whether or not Binance intended a policy change. The structural implication is that even without a deliberate slowdown, the mandatory routing through state-level diplomatic and legal channels inherently extends the timeline for asset preservation, creating a friction point that investigators argue undermines the efficacy of rapid response measures in fast-moving digital asset crimes.

Company figures portray a large compliance operation. Binance says it supported more than 71,000 law-enforcement requests during 2025 and helped seize roughly $752 million in illicit assets worldwide. Those numbers are self-reported and unaudited in the material reviewed here. They establish the volume Binance says it handles while leaving open the questions that matter most: response times, how many urgent holds were granted, and how often assets had already moved. The disparity between the high volume of requests processed and the lack of granular data on success rates or latency creates a blind spot for regulators. Without independent verification of these metrics, it remains difficult to assess whether the shift to MLAT channels has materially degraded the effectiveness of these interventions or if the sheer scale of operations simply masks underlying inefficiencies in the current cooperation framework.

The concern extends beyond Binance and cryptocurrency. The 2024 SIRIUS Electronic Evidence Situation Report, published by Europol, Eurojust and the European Judicial Network, found judicial cooperation for cross-border data remained slow and cumbersome, while voluntary arrangements with companies were faster but carried less legal certainty. An earlier SIRIUS survey from 2020 quantified it: 94% of responding judicial authorities identified the length of procedures for engaging non-EU service providers as their main difficulty.

That figure predates the current dispute by six years, though the 2024 report indicates the structural problem persists. Crypto compresses the timeline. In a separate Eurojust case, an alleged laundering service processed more than €336 million between 2022 and 2025, with customers able to send stolen cryptocurrency and receive assets through a complex transaction chain in roughly an hour. That operation had no reported connection to Binance, and Eurojust did not attribute the movement to any treaty delay. It illustrates how little time authorities have before proceeds are divided and routed onward.

Woofun AI data shows that in November 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and breaching US sanctions, agreeing to pay roughly $4.3 billion and undertake extensive compliance reforms. The settlement installed two independent monitors, who began work in 2024 and report separately to the Justice Department and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The DOJ term ran three years, the FinCEN term five. Both have since drifted from their original terms.

Binance asked FinCEN to drop its monitorship in April 2025 and asked the Justice Department to drop its own that September. Reuters reported that the DOJ paused corporate monitorships during 2025 as part of an informal review, and the department’s Binance monitorship has been effectively dormant for roughly a year while the company negotiates an end to it. This erosion of oversight mechanisms coincides with the current dispute over cooperation protocols, raising questions about the accountability structures currently in place.

Founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty personally, received a presidential pardon in October 2025. In April 2026, Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to the DOJ and Treasury asking about the status of both monitors and whether either had filed misconduct reports. Frances McLeod of Forensic Risk Alliance holds the DOJ role and Sharon Cohen Levin of Sullivan & Cromwell the FinCEN role. Both have stayed silent publicly. The silence of these key oversight figures, combined with the political maneuvering surrounding Zhao’s pardon and the termination of monitorships, suggests a significant shift in the regulatory posture toward the exchange. The lack of public reporting from the monitors leaves a vacuum in understanding whether the compliance reforms mandated by the 2023 settlement are being fully implemented or if the company is operating with reduced external scrutiny during this period of policy transition.

The freeze dispute follows separate reporting about Binance’s internal compliance team and transactions connected to Iran. The New York Times and Fortune reported that company investigators identified roughly $1.7 billion flowing through the exchange to Iran-linked wallets, and that several employees involved were suspended or dismissed after escalating their findings. Other outlets have put the figure at over $1 billion. Binance rejects the characterisation. The company says its own examination found no direct transactions between its accounts and Iranian entities, that the relevant users were removed and that information was shared with authorities.

It says the employees were disciplined over unauthorised disclosure of confidential customer data rather than for raising concerns, and it has sued the Wall Street Journal over related coverage it calls false and defamatory. The distinction between direct and indirect exposure carries real weight in that dispute, since assets can pass through several intermediary wallets before reaching a sanctioned destination. The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether Iran used Binance to evade sanctions. Its scope, including whether the exchange itself faces exposure, remains private.

A blockchain record lets analysts follow cryptocurrency long after it moves. Recovery depends on reaching an identifiable person, exchange or stablecoin issuer with the legal and technical power to stop it. Centralised exchanges matter most at that stage, since they hold customer identification records and can restrict withdrawals from accounts under their control. Once a balance reaches a self-custodied wallet, authorities may track it indefinitely without anyone able to freeze it. For fraud victims, the useful response remains immediate documentation and reporting.

Transaction hashes, receiving addresses, exchange account details, screenshots and exact timestamps help authorities identify the first destination before assets are split further. A report to customer support lacks the authority of a police preservation request or court order, so contacting the appropriate law-enforcement agency remains essential even when the transfer is visible on-chain. Civil litigation remains the fallback when those routes close. A group of 1,700 UK investors is pursuing a $200 million claim against Binance and Changpeng Zhao, a slower and costlier path than a freeze, though one that does not depend on catching the assets before they move.

On April 7, 2025, the Justice Department issued its "Ending Regulation by Prosecution" memorandum, directing prosecutors to prioritise people who defraud investors or use digital assets for terrorism, trafficking, hacking and organised crime. The department also disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. The policy reduced emphasis on pursuing exchanges for regulatory violations committed by their users, while still permitting cases against platforms that knowingly break criminal law. Binance’s 2023 obligations were not affected. Those arose from admitted conduct and sit separately from the government’s broader shift in crypto enforcement.

The memo describes what prosecutors were told to expect. Binance’s denial describes what the exchange says it does. Neither settles what happens to an individual case. The useful measures would be median time to preserve an account, the share of urgent applications receiving temporary holds and the value of assets withdrawn before a restriction applied. Binance does not publish those figures. Until it does, the central question stays open: whether these safeguards preserve due process while keeping open the narrow window in which stolen cryptocurrency can still be stopped.