According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to its military through a clandestine payments network using the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. While Tehran was preparing for a confrontation with the United States, a key player in financing the regime set up this system to circumvent American sanctions.
At the center of this affair is Babak Zanjani, an Iranian presenting himself as an “anti-sanctions” activist. According to internal Binance compliance documents cited by the American newspaper, the network he led carried out, in two years, approximately $850 million in transactions on the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Most of these operations went through a single trading account.
The system was not limited to this main account. Zanjani’s relatives, including his sister, his partner and an executive at one of his companies, also controlled other accounts. All were accessible from the same devices, a pattern that Binance’s internal investigators identified as a clue to evasion of US sanctions targeting Iran.
Despite several internal alerts, the central account continued to operate for at least fifteen months and was still open in January, according to Binance reports. Zanjani’s use of the platform had not previously been revealed.
These funds are part of a larger set of billions of dollars of cryptocurrency transactions that passed through Binance for the benefit of networks linked to the financing of the Revolutionary Guards, during the two years preceding the current war between the United States and Iran.
Foreign law enforcement officials told the Wall Street Journal that they continued to track financial flows through Binance accounts to Iranian entities linked to the regime this year, with transactions still being identified this month.
This revelation comes as CNN reported that American intelligence estimates the reconstitution of Iranian military capabilities faster than expected during the ceasefire, in particular with the partial resumption of drone production.
