Binance is now putting its forensic investigators at the disposal of police forces across Africa, tracing stolen crypto through the blockchain on official request and turning victim reports into arrests. The pitch is straightforward: every transaction leaves a permanent record, and the exchange says it can read that record faster than the scammers can move.
The mechanics here are worth separating from the marketing. A scam typically opens with a message that sounds too good to be true, an investment offer, a fake job, someone claiming to be a police officer. Once the victim pays, the money is moved rapidly from account to account so that it becomes impossible to find, and cross-border hops between platforms make the trail harder still for local law enforcement. Many victims never recover their losses.
What The Exchange Actually Does
Binance’s specialist investigators analyse the permanent record each crypto transaction creates, establishing where funds came from and where they were sent. The company says its teams respond promptly when authorities submit an official request through the appropriate legal channels, so investigations do not stall at the exchange’s door. Advanced monitoring systems also review activity around the clock, allowing suspicious transactions to be identified and stopped early.
The catch is that none of this runs automatically. Police must file the request first, through legal channels, and the tracing only works on funds that pass through Binance or can be linked to its records. Larry Cooke, a director at Binance Africa, framed the division of labour plainly: “Prevention is still the best defence but where police enforcement is in action, our role is to help investigators navigate how money moves through digital platforms, and keeping out any bad actors and keeping our users.” He added that combining expertise lets cases that may once have stalled progress towards meaningful outcomes.
Operation Red Card 2.0
The clearest test of the model so far ran between December 2025 and January 2026, when Binance supported INTERPOL and AFRIPOL, the African Union’s mechanism for police cooperation, in a coordinated operation across 16 African countries. Binance helped investigators trace payments made through mobile money services back to the base of a scam network. The operation produced 651 arrests.
That mobile money detail matters more than it might appear to a reader outside the continent. In much of Africa, mobile wallets rather than bank branches are the everyday payment rail, so a scam network’s cash-out point is often a SIM-linked account rather than a bank card. Tracing through that layer requires the exchange to connect an on-chain record to an off-chain payment endpoint, which is precisely the kind of link a blockchain analyst can build and a local police officer cannot.
The Compliance Record Behind The Pitch
Binance’s credentials on this front are not uncomplicated. The company pleaded guilty to violating US anti-money laundering rules on 21 November 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine. It pledged zero tolerance for illicit activity that year, yet investigative journalists have since reported that it continues to profit from money laundering for organised crime groups and sanctioned entities. Internal investigators who flagged suspicious transactions involving Russia and Iran were fired or suspended after reporting them to leadership, according to those accounts.
The regulatory pressure has not lifted. In 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Justice was investigating Binance for allegedly evading sanctions on Iran-backed designated foreign terrorist organisations, including the Houthis. Federal prosecutors also alleged in an asset forfeiture lawsuit that Chinese companies used the exchange to launder proceeds from oil sales for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Binance says it has cut the amount of money linked to crime reaching its platform by 96 percent since 2023.
Follow the money in the other direction and the picture gets stranger still. On 29 October 2026, an attacker moved roughly $6.36 billion out of Binance wallets across ten blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes, the largest crypto theft on record and roughly four times the $1.5 billion Bybit hack of February 2025. TRM Labs attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s hacking unit, a judgment the FBI confirmed. Tether, Circle, Ripple and World Liberty Financial froze about $2.67 billion in stablecoins, and Arbitrum’s Security Council froze a further tranche. Binance resumed withdrawals for Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, XRP, Base, Doge and Optimism on 1 November.
So the same exchange now marketing its tracing capability to African police forces is itself the subject of a live sanctions-evasion probe and the victim of the biggest heist in the sector’s history. Both things can be true at once, and both shape how much weight a detective in Nairobi or Lagos should put on its data.
Why African Forces Lean On Exchange Data
The answer is capacity. A national cybercrime unit in a country with 16-way cross-border coordination has neither the tools nor the staff to unpick a chain of wallet hops that crosses four jurisdictions in an afternoon. An exchange with a permanent ledger and full-time analysts does. When a case stalls, it usually stalls at exactly the point where the money leaves the local banking system, and that is the point where a request to Binance becomes the only live lead.
There is a commercial logic underneath the public-safety language, and it is not hidden. Every arrest enabled by exchange data is also an argument to regulators that the platform can be a partner rather than a problem, which is useful currency for a company with no official headquarters and a history of bans and fines. Cooke’s line about being “a trusted partner to law enforcement agencies across Africa” is doing that work.
For an ordinary user, the practical takeaway is narrower. Crypto held on an exchange is not insured the way a bank deposit is, as the October heist demonstrated when the full value of affected assets was still being counted. Binance Academy offers free lessons on how common scams work, with no account or registration required, which is the cheapest defence available to someone who has just received a too-good-to-be-true investment offer.
Where The Model Goes Next
Binance frames the African partnerships as a template rather than a one-off, pointing to the Red Card operation as proof that the tracing model produces arrests at scale. The company has not published a schedule for extending it to other regions or other categories of crime, and its own statement of intent stops at describing the role it plays when police act.
The next concrete marker is the record itself. Operation Red Card 2.0 closed in January 2026 with 651 arrests across 16 countries, and Binance’s 96 percent reduction figure is measured from 2023. Whether the exchange’s forensic teams become a standing fixture of African cross-border investigations, or remain a resource invoked case by case, will show up in the arrest counts of the operations that follow.
Sources
- Binance Joins Police Across Africa in the Fight Against Scams
- Binance
- North Korea Steals USD 6.36 Billion From Binance in the Largest Hack in History | TRM Labs
- A simple explainer of the massive $6.3 billion crypto heist at Binance
- Binance targeted in $6.3 billion crypto heist, the largest ever
- Binance resumes withdrawals for some major cryptocurrencies after $6 billion heist
Photo: Massimiliano Mariani (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
