Binance's April 2025 Policy Change Slowed Law Enforcement Access to User Data, New York Times Reports

Binance changed how it hands over user data to foreign police in April 2025, and investigators say it's making crypto crime cases harder to work, according to the New York Times.

The world's largest crypto exchange used to work directly with law enforcement agencies to freeze suspicious accounts and turn over user information during investigations. That direct line still exists for the worst cases: child sexual abuse material, terrorism, and imminent threats to life. Everything else now largely gets routed through the government of the United Arab Emirates, where Binance operates a regulated entity under the Abu Dhabi Global Market, the Times reported.

That rerouting matters because most financial crime investigations don't fall into those three emergency categories. Scams, money laundering, stolen funds, fraud rings. The routine stuff. That's exactly the category the Times reported is now getting slower, with response times "substantially" increased, according to a senior European law enforcement official cited by the paper.

Cops in Five Countries Say the Same Thing

The Times' reporting is anchored in a June law enforcement conference in the Netherlands, where police officials from five European countries described the same problem: getting records out of Binance now takes longer.

Alona Katz, an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, put it bluntly to the Times: "How fast you get your records determines the outcome of your case." In fraud and laundering cases, funds move fast. Suspects close accounts, launder through mixers, or cash out entirely while paperwork sits in a queue.

Under the new setup, foreign agencies that want data outside the emergency categories generally have to go through Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties. MLATs are the formal, government-to-government channel for exchanging evidence in criminal cases. They exist for a reason: they protect due process and national sovereignty over what data crosses borders. But requests under this process can take considerably longer than the direct cooperation Binance previously offered, according to the reporting.

Binance's Defense

Binance disputes the idea that it has pulled back. "Binance has not slowed its cooperation with global law enforcement," a company spokesperson told CoinDesk. "On the contrary, we have increased our cooperation year over year, while navigating the increasing complexity of government approaches to crypto regulation and data protection."

The company says its assistance goes "beyond any legal obligation upon us and what traditional financial services firms typically do," describing the change as "a deliberate strengthening of the controls and safeguards that govern how we cooperate, which is consistent with the standards expected of a regulated institution."

Crypto regulation is a genuine patchwork right now, country by country, and data privacy law is a legitimate constraint that traditional banks navigate too. Binance isn't wrong that regulatory complexity has increased. The company's argument is essentially: we formalized the pipe, we didn't shut it.

The problem is that "we cooperate more overall" and "individual case response times got slower" are not contradictory statements, and Binance's public defense doesn't actually rebut the specific complaint from investigators. Total cooperation volume can rise while per-case speed drops, especially if Binance is now processing far more requests worldwide than it did in past years. Neither the Times nor Binance's statement resolves that gap with hard numbers on request-to-response times before and after April 2025.

A Second Report Points the Same Direction

This Times report follows an earlier account from The Information, which cited a Justice Department memo reportedly warning federal prosecutors handling crypto cases to prepare for less assistance from Binance when seeking to freeze or seize assets. Binance denied that its cooperation with U.S. authorities had changed. The Department of Justice has not commented on the memo.

What's Unresolved

The Times' account rests heavily on the June Netherlands conference and law enforcement sources describing frustration, not on a systematic count of delayed cases or response-time data.

Binance could publish actual average response times for MLAT-routed requests versus its old direct-cooperation numbers, broken out by country and case type. Until that exists, both sides are arguing from anecdote, and prosecutors like Katz are the ones stuck waiting on the clock.