I'm not happy about it, but it should come as no surprise when regulated fiat exchanges avoid doing business with "risky" customers. That's their prerogative.
We've seen what can happen when exchanges flout money laundering regulations.
As far as I can tell nobody is really holding a gun to CZ's head and forcing him to do fiat business in some hyper-regulated shithole, nor forcing him to screw customers over without properly disclosing what the customers are or are not allowed to do with their funds.
All of the FATF member countries are becoming hyper-regulated, not just Singapore. The US and the EU are becoming draconian too.
I'd say that anyone using
any centralized exchange should expect anything from invasive AML/KYC to frozen funds, account closures or outright exit scamming. The root of the problem is that people trust exchanges not to do these things.
It is entirely Binance's fault for handling it the way they did and they fully deserve to be ridiculed as an example of extreme overreach.
I'm confident that Gemini, Coinbase and many others are closing accounts in similar cases. They usually aren't stupid enough to say why.
About a year ago,
there was a very similar case with Bitfinex.
It is overreach, but I think it would be naive to deny this is the direction things are headed. This is actually one of the reasons I prefer ChipMixer to CoinJoins. The latter are too obvious on-chain, at least when using popular methods like Wasabi Wallet.
I fully agree, but I also think it's worth pointing out. Binance buried themselves in the Seychelles rather than a more respectable jurisdiction for good reason.