Above a budget hotel in Dubai’s Deira neighborhood, inside an unremarkable office, sits what investigators now describe as the nerve center of a multi-billion-dollar sanctions-evasion operation. The exchange is called Shelbit. The operator is Siavash Kayvanpour, an Iranian expatriate. The amount processed: at least $4 billion in crypto since May 2024.
A Reuters investigation published July 31, 2026 laid out the full picture.
How the scheme worked
More than 2,000 illegal gambling websites, most of them targeting Iranian users, formed the revenue-generating layer of the network. Iran bans gambling, so the sites operated in a legal gray zone for users and a very illegal zone for the operators. The sites plugged into Iran’s central bank payment systems to collect deposits.
The crypto leg of the operation is where Shelbit came in. Funds moved from those gambling sites through Shelbit, which acted as an unlicensed exchange. Blockchain investigators were able to trace roughly $676 million in identifiable transactions from Shelbit to Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume. The $4 billion total figure represents Shelbit’s full processing volume, with $676 million being the portion that analysts could pin down with on-chain evidence.
