Federal prosecutors in New York have moved to seize roughly $61 million in cryptocurrency they say represents the laundered proceeds of black-market sales of sanctioned Iranian oil, in a case that puts digital-asset compliance back at the centre of sanctions enforcement. In a civil forfeiture complaint announced on 14 September 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York alleged that two China-based companies used trading accounts at the cryptocurrency exchange Binance to move illicit oil money to the Government of Iran and its military.
The action targets the funds themselves, not Binance, and the government has not alleged wrongdoing by the exchange. Prosecutors say the $61 million is a slice of a far larger flow: investigators have grouped a web of linked wallets under the label “Entity A,” which they say handled upwards of $1.5 billion in proceeds from illegal Iranian oil sales.
What the complaint alleges
According to the complaint, the two firms, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, took in money generated by illegal sales of Iranian crude and petroleum and passed it on to the Iranian state, its agents and its proxies, among them the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a group Washington lists as a terrorist organisation. The forfeiture action runs alongside a broader sanctions campaign against Iran's crypto infrastructure, including the designation of the Iran-linked exchanges Shelbit and Aban Tether. Each presented a respectable face, the government says: Blessed Trust as a wealth-management or asset-custody operation and Hexa Whale as a commodities dealer, while in practice both allegedly handled Iranian oil revenue and coordinated closely with each other.
Prosecutors also portray Blessed Trust as a gateway from ordinary money into crypto, a role it allegedly played at times through issuers based in the United States. The two firms, whose clients allegedly included Chinese petroleum companies, are said to have moved tens of millions of dollars across American banks and payment systems and, the government contends, scattered the funds across wallets to obscure their origin and ownership.
Deputy U.S. Attorney Sean S. Buckley said the Government of Iran “used a network of cryptocurrency actors in China and elsewhere to launder more than $1.5 billion in illicit oil money,” and that the action seizes money that “otherwise would have promoted hostile military action and terrorist attacks against the U.S. and our allies.”
Why it matters for compliance
For compliance teams, the case reminds them that sanctions evasion increasingly runs through digital assets and the front companies built around them. Treasury has described a similar architecture in its action against Iran's intelligence cyber unit and its crypto-for-oil network. The alleged laundering did not depend on an obscure venue: it reportedly moved through accounts at a mainstream exchange and through U.S.-based crypto issuers, underscoring the exposure exchanges, custodians, and on-ramp providers can face when a customer misrepresents the nature of its business.
The government’s framing that entities posing as a custody firm and a commodities broker were in fact conduits for sanctioned oil revenue points to the due-diligence gap regulators keep flagging: know-your-customer (KYC) and transaction-monitoring controls have to see through corporate labels to the underlying activity. The FBI, whose New York Counterintelligence and Espionage Division led the investigation with support from the Justice Department’s National Security and Criminal Divisions, said the case shows its ability to “follow the money” across blockchains.
None of this is settled. A forfeiture complaint only sets out the government’s case against the money, and the allegations stand as claims unless and until a court ultimately rules for the United States.
