The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed 13 charges Monday against the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, and its co-founder Changpeng Zhao for allegedly running an illegal operation, according to court documents.
Binance allegedly operated an illegal cryptocurrency exchange, and Zhao allegedly commingled billions of dollars of customer funds and distributed them to another entity he controlled, according to the SEC court filing. The defendants showed a “blatant disregard of the federal securities laws and the investor and market protections these laws provide,” the SEC stated.
“In so doing, Defendants have enriched themselves by billions of U.S. dollars while placing investors’ assets at significant risk,” the filing continues.
Zhao and Binance allegedly moved investors’ crypto and fiat assets, including billions of U.S. dollars of customer funds to Merit Peak Limited, a company controlled by Zhao incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, according to the filing.
“We are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro,” Binance’s then-chief compliance officer Samuel Lim acknowledged to another compliance official in December 2018, according to the SEC filing.
The SEC suit follows a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) lawsuit in March that Binance and Zhao did not follow regulations, according to a CFTC filing.
Meanwhile, the company allegedly hid its efforts to help certain high-value U.S. customers keep trading on the platform, according to the filing. “[O]n the surface we cannot be seen to have US users[,] but in reality, we should get them through other creative means,” Lim stated.
Zhao allegedly said his “goal” was “to reduce the losses to ourselves, and at the same time to make the U.S. regulatory authorities not trouble us,” according to the filing.
“We believe the lawsuit is baseless and we intend to defend ourselves vigorously,” Binance.US said in a statement on Twitter, adding, “today’s filing is unjustified by the facts, by the law, or by the Commission’s own precedent. The relief sought by the Commission would harm the very investors the SEC is charged with protecting.”
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Independent Journalism Is Dying
Ever since President Trump’s miraculous victory, we’ve heard an incessant drumbeat about how legacy media is dying. This is true. The people have awakened to the reality that they’re being lied to by the self-proclaimed “Arbiters of Truth” for the sake of political expediency, corporate self-protection, and globalist ambitions.
But even as independent journalism rises to fill the void left by legacy media, there is still a huge challenge. Those at the top of independent media like Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, and Tucker Carlson are thriving and rightly so. They have earned their audience and the financial rewards that come from it. They’ve taken risks and worked hard to get to where they are.
For “the rest of us,” legacy media and their proxies are making it exceptionally difficult to survive, let alone thrive. They still have a stranglehold over the “fact checkers” who have a dramatic impact on readership and viewership. YouTube, Facebook, and Google still stifle us. The freer speech platforms like Rumble and 𝕏 can only reward so many of their popular content creators. For independent journalists on the outside looking in, our only recourse is to rely on affiliates and sponsors.
But even as it seems nearly impossible to make a living, there are blessings that should not be disregarded. By highlighting strong sponsors who share our America First worldview, we have been able to make lifelong connections and even a bit of revenue to help us along. This is why we enjoy symbiotic relationships with companies like MyPillow, Jase Medical, and Promised Grounds. We help them with our recommendations and they reward us with money when our audience buys from them.
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Independent media is the future. In many ways, that future is already here. While the phrase, “the more the merrier,” does not apply to this business because there are still some bad actors in the independent media field, there are many great ones that do not get nearly enough attention. We hope to change that one content creator at a time.
Thank you and God Bless,
JD Rucker
