The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday announced it has disrupted a Hamas terrorism financing scheme and seized about $201,400 in cryptocurrency.
The scheme laundered over $1.5 million for the Palestinian terrorist organization, beginning in October 2024.
The money-laundering operation was allegedly coordinated through a group chat on an encrypted communications platform, which offered Hamas supporters an ever-changing list of at least 17 cryptocurrency “wallets” they could dump their donations into.
The cryptocurrency was then “sent into an operational wallet and laundered through a series of virtual currency exchanges and transactions by leveraging suspected financiers and over-the-counter brokers,” according to the DOJ press release on Thursday.
“Included among the assets seized were cryptocurrency addresses valued at approximately $89,900 and three additional accounts containing cryptocurrency valued at approximately $111,500. These accounts were registered in the names of Palestinian individuals living in Turkey and elsewhere,” the statement said.
Hamas has allegedly been using cryptocurrency wallets to launder money and finance terrorist activity since at least 2020, in addition to using corrupt financial exchanges to bring foreign cash into Gaza and the West Bank.
Both the U.S. and Israeli governments have conducted large seizures of suspected Hamas cryptocurrency over the past few years. Israel has an agency called the National Bureau for Counter-Terror Financing (NBCTF) that specializes in tracking terrorist funding streams, including those which use cryptocurrency. The agency has also been successful at seizing cryptocurrency from the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorists of Hezbollah.
Hamas made a public announcement in April 2023 that it would no longer use crypto to launder its donations because the NBCTF had grown so adept at locating and seizing the money. This statement was clearly a ruse, as Thursday’s seizure demonstrates. Instead of giving up on crypto, Hamas explored using new cryptocurrency networks that might be harder for law enforcement to intercept.
The seizure announced on Thursday by DOJ primarily involved Tether’s USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin. Stablecoins are digital currencies whose value is linked to a traditional currency, most commonly the U.S. dollar, as is the case with USDT.
Contrary to the eternal cries of poverty and deprivation from Palestinian officials, Hamas is fantastically wealthy, with hundreds of millions of dollars floating through its numbered accounts and crypto wallets. Of course, none of that money ever reaches the Palestinian people – the funds are spent on weapons, bribes, and terrorist operations, not food and medicine. Foreign supporters pumping huge donations into Hamas crypto wallets know perfectly well the terrorist organization will not use a dime of that money for the betterment of the Palestinian public.
The U.S. Treasury department is currently investigating over $165 million dollars’ worth of Hamas crypto, a treasure hoard orders of magnitude larger than the $201,400 seizure announced on Thursday.
“These seizures show that this office will search high and low for every cent of money going to fund Hamas, wherever it is found, and in whatever form of currency,” U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. of the District of Columbia said on Thursday.
“Hamas is responsible for the death of many U.S. and Israeli nationals, and we will stop at nothing to stop their campaign of terror and murder,” he said.
