Binance said its employees who were questioned by authorities in the United Arab Emirates have been cleared and released, after the staff provided statements to UAE authorities about third-party fund flows through a company client money account, a spokesperson for the exchange told Cointelegraph.

The New York Times reported Thursday that two Binance employees were detained after being stopped at airports in the UAE, amid police inquiries into possible financial crimes involving the exchange.

According to the exchange, the employees were not the targets or subjects of what Binance described as “routine inquiries.”

“Cryptocurrency and the mechanics of institutional client money accounts remain emerging concepts in many jurisdictions; we are working constructively with Dubai Police and authorities across other Emirates to establish clear, appropriate coordination procedures,” the spokesperson said.

Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. The UAE, and Dubai in particular, has grown into one of the world’s most prominent hubs for digital asset businesses. Dubai established a dedicated virtual asset regulator, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), in 2022 to license and supervise virtual asset service providers, and international exchanges operate in the emirate under its regime. The UAE has separately strengthened its wider anti-money-laundering framework in recent years: the Financial Action Task Force placed the country on its “grey list” of jurisdictions under increased monitoring in March 2022 and removed it in February 2024.

The scrutiny of staff abroad comes against a documented backdrop of past compliance penalties for the exchange. In November 2023, Binance agreed to pay roughly $4.3 billion to settle U.S. federal cases, including with the Justice Department, over anti-money-laundering and sanctions failures, and its co-founder and then-CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program.

The episode is not the first time Binance staff have faced detention abroad. In 2024, Nigerian authorities detained Tigran Gambaryan, then Binance’s head of financial crime compliance and a former U.S. Internal Revenue Service special agent, for eight months while he faced money laundering charges. By October 2024, the Nigerian government had dropped all charges against Gambaryan. In the UAE case, Binance’s statement did not address whether the third-party fund flows that prompted the inquiries remain under review by authorities.