In early 2025, an embattled Iranian regime was turning increasingly to crypto in order to thwart sanctions choking its economy. During this time, a VIP account on Binance registered to a 79-year-old Chinese resident used a series of transfers to send $439 million worth of digital tokens from the crypto exchange to an outside wallet. That wallet in turn forwarded most of the funds to ones that company investigators would later identify as connected to sanctioned organizations linked to Iran like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
As the investigators detailed in documents reviewed by Fortune, it was suspicious for a single elderly man to be moving hundreds of millions of dollars. This was especially the case since the transactions in question involved moving Tether stablecoins on the blockchain Tron—a payment method favored by cyber-criminals and money launderers.
Surprisingly, though, the transfers triggered no immediate alarms for Binance, which had agreed in late 2023 to impose a rigorous series of compliance procedures as part of a $4.3 billion plea agreement with the U.S. government.
“This is not merely a red flag, it is an immediate escalation trigger,” said Amanda Wick, a former federal prosecutor and head of Americas at the crypto compliance software company VerifyVASP, upon learning of the transactions from Fortune.
