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Crypto exchange Binance continued to process trades by clients in Iran despite US sanctions against the country and a company ban on doing business there, according to Reuters.

In 2018, the US reimposed sanctions on Iran which had been suspended three years earlier as part of Iran's nuclear deal with major world powers. That November, Binance informed traders in Iran that it would no longer serve them, telling them to liquidate their accounts.

However, seven traders told the newswire that they had avoided the ban. The traders said they continued to use their Binance accounts until as recently as September 2021, only losing access after the exchange tightened its anti-money laundering checks a month earlier. Until that point, customers could trade by registering with just an email address, it said. 

The report quoted one trader, Asal Alizade, as saying: “There were some alternatives, but none of them were as good as Binance. It didn’t need identity verification, so we all used it.” The Tehran-based trader said she used the exchange until September last year.

At a time when the US, the European Union, the UK, Switzerland and certain other countries are also clamping down on financial exchanges involving Russia because of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine, the story raises questions about how strong such controls are.

"We have assembled a globally recognized compliance and regulatory program that has been our core objective over the past 18 months. As a company that is only five years old, this endeavor has been our primary focus for a large part of our company’s existence. This industry-leading sanctions program is fully compliant with all international financial sanctions, including blocking platform access to users in Iran, North Korea, among many others. We have also implemented advanced detection tools that allowed us to further crackdown on users in sanctioned regions that had access to sophisticated masking tools including VPNs," a spokesperson for Binance told this news service in an emailed statement.

"We have a robust compliance program that incorporates anti-money laundering and global sanctions principles and tools used by financial institutions to detect and address suspicious activity. As a result of our strong compliance/KYC program, we were able to secure approvals and registration from France and Italy, making us the only crypto company to do so from G-7 countries. In this nascent and fast-growing industry, we have quickly evolved to ensure the highest standard of regulatory compliance as the space continues maturing and as we learn/adapt alongside other players and regulators," the statement added. 

The Reuters story said that 11 other people in Iran, beyond those it interviewed, said on their LinkedIn profiles that they too traded crypto at Binance after the 2018 ban. None of them responded to questions, the report said. 

The world of digital assets, while shaken by big falls of bitcoin and woes in areas such as so-called “stablecoins,” continues to attract attention and enthusiastic marketing. In June this year Binance announced an “exclusive multi-year partnership” with Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo. The five-time Ballon D’or winner has joined forces with Binance to provide a series of NFT [non-fungible token] collections that will launch exclusively on Binance’s official NFT platform.

On March 16, Binance set out a range of initiatives which it said are designed to stay on top of regulations. For example, it has joined the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, January, a non-profit corporation focused on identifying, validating, mitigating, and neutralizing cybercrime threats. It has launched a new API tool helping users to keep track of their crypto activities to ensure that they meet their country’s regulatory requirements. It also said that it has implemented a law enforcement request system that government and law enforcement agencies can use to submit information requests.