The UK-registered address of one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, is only a small building in eastern Britain shared by thousands of other companies.
On June 19, A.J mail On the r/buttcoin subreddit, it showed the so-called “utility locker” Binance Ltd and thousands of other companies use as their registered office address in the UK — a tactic often used by tech companies and other large corporations.
The Binance Ltd address refers to the small town of Mildenhall in the county of Suffolk, England. Google Maps shows the site as a small, nondescript garage located on the outer edge of town about an hour and a half drive from London.
Companies House – Governmental Company Registrar – Offers Binance Ltd shares the address with 2,403 active companies in total.
The address is actually the website of a company called OfficeServ, which is a registered virtual address service provider that aims to give a “believable business location,” according to website.
Corporate home Offers Binance Ltd is registered to provide “other service activities not elsewhere classified.” Binance has about six destinations In Britain through different addresses registered to provide information technology services and financial services.
Related: Binance cancels registration for inactive businesses in the UK
Cointelegraph reached out to Binance for more information about the entity but did not immediately receive a response.
Shell games for technology companies
Technology companies have used such “shell” virtual addresses around the world and in the United States for years. These are used for a range of reasons – from providing privacy or obscuring patent filings or registering a company in a corporate tax haven.
Notable among them is the Corporation Trust Company, which is the largest registered agent services company in the world, user By thousands of companies, including well-known ones like Google, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Apple. It operates out of a similar, nondescript brick building in Delaware.
This completely nondescript building in Wilmington, Delaware is (probably) the most famous address in corporate law.
1209 North Orange Street.
It houses the Trust Trust Center, which is the address of the registered agent for about three hundred thousand companies. Including some giants. pic.twitter.com/HhdaUfKXCU
– Lucius Winslow (@Lucius_Winslow) November 15, 2020
The company was used by Apple last November in an attempt to hide patent inserts for its recently announced Vision Pro headphones and associated operating system.
Another company, Wyoming Corporate Services, was described in 2011 by Reuters expose as a “brick house” in a “sleepy city” and home to 2,000 registered companies at the time.
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