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This is funny or sad ,depending on how you look at it
US Justice Dept Mulling Criminal Charges Against Binance Founder CZ: Report https://decrypt.co/116961/us-justice-dept-mulling-criminal-charges-against-binance-founder-cz-report
Imagine you're CZ. You just exposed one of the biggest fraudsters ever. And now the DOJ wants to investage...you. Meanwhile, the actual fraudster is still free, giving interviews. Yeah, the DOJ has been looking into binance for years, but it shows the unfairness of it all I guess.
While it would surely be emotionally satisfying to arrest and indict Sam Bankman-Fried the reason the DoJ moves slowly is that after you bring an indictment there are avenues for the defendant to challenge further investigatory actions and there is a constitutional right to a speedy trial so you also face time limits in how long you can defer from the indictment to the trial (unless the Defendant consents). This creates a bias towards making sure you gather all the evidence you reasonably can before bringing an indictment.
Frankly, the investigation(s) into Binance seem good to me. Surely it's better to stop the fraud while it's occurring (and before funds have been lost) than let it continue and steal more from people.
I disagree even though I still think crypto is a bad investment . I don't even think a fraud was committed in the case of binance, unlike FTX. Unless they are stealing money from people like in the case of SBF/FTX, I don't care what they do. Money laundering seems like a BS reason so the US can enforce its monopoly/reach on global finance. It's like "We don't like your business. Because some shady money was occasionally passed through it, we will try to shut it down even though your businesses otherwise did nothing illegal and customers are happy."
What evidence makes you think fraud hasn't been committed in the case of Binance? Does this evidence differ from evidence we had about FTX one year ago about whether they were committing fraud? Frankly, given the number of large volume crypto exchanges that have turned out to be frauds I kind of think "this exchange is committing fraud" is a pretty good prior.
It's not as many as you probably assume . MtGox, FTX, maybe some others...out of hundreds of exchanges. The reason why fraud is not more prevalent, i suppose, is because running an exchange is quite profitable, without having to resort to fraud, such as fees. Odds are Binance is not fraudulent. An exchange being hacked and customer funds being lost is not the same as fraudulent (unless it was an inside job, I suppose).
Here's a list of ~450 (by line count) exchanges which failed: https://www.cryptowisser.com/exchange-graveyard/
75 exchanges closed down in 2020: https://cointelegraph.com/news/75-crypto-exchanges-have-closed-down-so-far-in-2020
51 in 2020: https://news.bitcoin.com/cryptowisser-51-crypto-exchanges-dead-in-2022-exchange-deaths-down-40-despite-crypto-winter/
https://coinjournal.net/news/42-percent-of-failed-crypto-exchanges-vanished-leaving-users-in-the-lurch/ lists 94 in 2020 and 81 in 2020... Higher than the others. From my work, there are more than a few which certainly weren't listed in the above. (Some 0 years when quite a few scams occurred.) Note, 42% disappeared without any justification at all.
Lot of which failed to really launch/aggregate large amounts of volume, though.
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