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.

It is also one of the largest Iranian sanctions-evasion networks discovered since 2016, when the U.S. broke up a roughly $20 billion IRGC gold-for-oil operation based in Turkey. Separately, the U.S. seized $1 billion in crypto from Iran in May.

"It's an IRGC operation, and that's plain as day," said Rich Sanders, an independent blockchain researcher and investigator focused on Iran.
Reuters said it could not determine whether the IRGC directly controlled Shelbit or the gambling network.
The IRGC, founded in 1979, is Iran's most powerful military, political and economic institution, answering directly to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei.
Shelbit also interacts directly with Iran's central bank, wallets linked to the IRGC by the Israeli government, and Nobitex, an Iranian exchange sanctioned by the U.S. earlier this year following a Reuters investigation.

Some of the crypto flowing to Shelbit came from what two investigative firms described as an Iranian bitcoin mining operation that creates new digital coins.

Read the original report at CoinDesk

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