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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

OK so the US is going after them for ~120M (for 2020) , when their profits were ~20B?

In any case this is contrary to the main accusation that "Much of Binance’s reported trading volume, and its profitability, has come from its extensive solicitation of and access to customers located in the United States"

AFAIK throughout the years they were publicly sending users to binance.us and did not encourage breaking the rule. Didn't seem like "Extensive solicitation"

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One of the allegations in the complaint is that they did indeed encourage breaking the rule, walking high-value customers through the process of falsifying their location. For example, the CFTC has an alleged quote:

> VIP team member: Hi CZ . . . I went through list of affected API clients, it includes a number of large strategic accounts including [a Chicago-headquartered trading firm] who is currently is a top 5 client and 12% of our volume

> Zhao: Give them a heads up to ensure they don’t connect from a us Ip. Don’t leave anything in writing. They have non us entities. Let’s also make sure we don’t hit the biggest market makers with that email first. Do you have signal?

Using a US IP for trading is probably not illegal in itself, people travel. In another passage they are saying that their VIP customers created offshores to use for trading and that binance was notifying customers that looked like US to do the same. I am reading the evidence for entertainment and it seems a bit try-hard tbh

Not to mention sophisticated trading firms are not necessarily sending orders/instructions from the same IP. A lot of them have multiple network interfaces set up for each exchange they're trading on.

Right. The CFTC's characterization of that behavior, which I think is correct, is that VIP customers created offshore shell companies to falsify their locations and Binance encouraged them to do so.

it's not uncommon for lawful hedge funds trading equities to have offshore shell companies. Employees of those funds have these types of accounts too.

I only point this out because your comment read as if this was a smoking gun.

depends, by that metric all the Swiss banks are illegal

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