Binance founder CZ moved from prison to halfway house — isn’t free yet

Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has been moved from his prison to the RRM Long Beach halfway house in California and has not been freed, despite claims from excited X (formerly Twitter) users.  

CZ was initially being held at FCI Lompoc II prison, also in California. However, the federal inmate tracker was updated this week to reveal he has been moved to Long Beach. 

RRM Long Beach is classed as a ‘residential reentry management (RRM) field office,’ otherwise known as a ‘halfway house.’ Federal inmate communications provider InmateAID says it is a housing unit that assists inmates nearing their release date.

InmateAID says, “There is no security level other than voluntary compliance but there is a strict adherence to the rules of the house.”

This means that while CZ will technically be out of prison — RRM Long Beach is a Bureau of Prisons-administered facility rather than a prison per se — he will still be serving his sentence.

X users and numerous crypto firms, however, mistakenly interpreted the news as an early release for CZ. 

There was previously confusion about CZ’s release date, with many believing he was due to be freed on August 30. This date did correlate with his sentencing on April 30, but he wasn’t actually imprisoned until late May. 

This means that CZ still has 38 days of his sentence to serve and will actually be released on September 29. However, while this sentence might be drawing to a close, he’s now got another lawsuit to worry about.

Read more: Ryan Salame gets longer prison sentence than CZ

CZ and Binance have been accused by three crypto traders of losing their funds through lax money laundering regulations.

The suit, which was filed on August 16, claims that Binance’s failure to implement and maintain effective anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) rules allowed criminals to move stolen funds to Binance so it could be laundered covertly.

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