A major illegal gambling network based in Dubai is sending millions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrency through an alleged $4 billion Iranian sanctions-evasion operation, Reuters reported on Friday.
Considered one of the world's largest, with more than 2,000 platforms, the illegal gambling network is a major customer of Shelbit, an unlicensed crypto exchange run by Iranian expatriate Siavash Kayvanpour. Shelbit is the hub of the Iranian money-moving operation, through which the gambling network, Iran's central bank and other sanctioned Iranian entities have access to global crypto markets, according to the report. The Central Bank of Iran has been sanctioned under U.S. counterterrorism authorities since 2019 over its support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its Quds Force, and Hezbollah.
Shelbit has moved hundreds of millions of dollars to some of the most prominent crypto companies, including Binance, the world's largest exchange, according to the report. Binance said Shelbit had never held an account on its platform and that transactions linked to Shelbit were not considered high risk. The exchange said it investigated users associated with Shelbit, froze relevant accounts and reported them to law enforcement.
"This is by far the biggest Iranian illegal gambling network ever discovered and one of the biggest in the world," said John Wojcik, a former researcher at Infoblox and now senior analyst at TRM Labs, who spent seven years investigating illegal gambling for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.