Two Binance Employees Detained in UAE as Second Report Details Funds-Account Inquiry
UAE police questioned two Binance employees in recent weeks as part of an inquiry into possible financial crimes, the New York Times reported Thursday, citing four people familiar with the matter. Both Crypto Briefing and Unchained picked up the Times report within a day, and a follow-up from Crypto Briefing added another detail: police interest in a specific account the exchange uses to hold customer funds.
What happened
According to the Times, as relayed by Crypto Briefing, the employees were stopped at UAE airports, with one midlevel staffer held overnight at a police station in Sharjah. A separate Binance executive who runs the company’s Dubai subsidiary was questioned in July, Crypto Briefing reported. Unchained’s account of the same Times story adds that it was not immediately clear what UAE authorities were investigating.
Binance told the Times, per both outlets, that a small number of staff were asked to give statements as part of what the company called routine inquiries into third-party fund flows. Binance said none of the employees were targets, and that all were cleared and released.
How the story sharpened
A day later, Crypto Briefing published a second report that moved the story from vague fraud inquiries to a specific mechanism: police in Dubai and Sharjah had questioned Binance personnel in connection with an account the company uses to hold customer money, the outlet reported. Some of those staffers were signatories on the account, according to Crypto Briefing, which said authorities had received complaints about it. Binance said it is coordinating with Dubai Police and other emirate authorities on procedures, and a company spokesperson again said employees gave standard statements and were never subjects of the inquiries.
Where the reports agree, and where they diverge
All three articles agree on the core sequence: Binance employees were questioned by UAE police, both were released, and Binance says none were targets. Two of the three — the first Crypto Briefing piece and Unchained — corroborate the $2 billion investment Abu Dhabi state investor MGX made in Binance, which Unchained dates to March 2025 and describes as the largest single investment in a crypto company.
The reports diverge on detail and framing. Only Crypto Briefing names Sharjah as the site of an overnight detention and reports that a Dubai subsidiary executive was questioned in July; neither of those details appears in Unchained’s account. Only Crypto Briefing’s second report identifies the customer-funds bank account and staff signatories as the specific subject of the probe — a detail absent from the original Times-sourced coverage in both outlets a day earlier. And only Crypto Briefing cites a $4.3 billion figure for Binance’s 2023 US criminal settlement; that number does not appear in Unchained’s piece, which instead references Binance founder Changpeng Zhao’s 2023 guilty plea to US anti-money-laundering violations without a settlement figure of its own.
Unchained alone reports a separate development: the outlet says Binance shifted its approach in April 2025, directing most foreign law-enforcement requests to UAE authorities and mutual legal assistance treaties rather than responding to them directly, and that police from five European countries said at a June gathering in the Netherlands that this slowed investigations into scams and money laundering. Unchained also alone notes that two Binance executives, including compliance chief Tigran Gambaryan, were detained in Nigeria in February 2024, and that Binance has roughly 1,000 employees in the UAE among 323 million registered users company-wide.
Why it matters
Binance has built the UAE into its regulatory home base: licensed entities inside Abu Dhabi Global Market, the $2 billion MGX investment, and a residence for Zhao. A police inquiry touching Binance staff and a customer funds account tests that relationship, even on Binance’s own account that the questioning was routine and non-targeted.
What remains unresolved
The Times itself said it was not immediately clear what UAE authorities were investigating. It is also not established in the reporting whether the fraud inquiry described in the initial Times story and the bank-account, signatory-focused probe described a day later by Crypto Briefing are the same investigation or two related but separate matters. Dubai and Sharjah authorities did not immediately comment, according to Crypto Briefing, and the total number of employees questioned beyond the cases named in these reports is not known.
Sources
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
Read More
