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.

The network’s wallet connections do not stop at gambling revenue. Investigators found links to Iran’s central bank and to wallets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

Regulators move, influencers get caught

Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, known as VARA, issued a cease-and-desist order against Shelbit on July 24, 2026, one week before the Reuters investigation went public. The order cited money-laundering concerns and the fact that Shelbit was operating without a license.

Kayvanpour and the principals behind the broader gambling network share a criminal conviction for illegal gambling from 2023.

Iranian social media personalities based outside Iran, including Sasha Sobhani and Pooyan Mokhtari, were involved in promoting the gambling sites to audiences in the country. Both have faced legal consequences.

What this means for exchanges and investors

The $676 million figure traced to Binance will generate significant scrutiny for the exchange. Binance has spent years rebuilding its regulatory relationships after a historic settlement with U.S. authorities in 2023, and headlines connecting its wallets to IRGC-adjacent flows complicate that effort.

The U.S. Treasury is reportedly targeting Iranian regime-linked digital assets in response to these findings. Treasury designations and secondary sanctions create legal exposure for any exchange or counterparty that continues processing transactions connected to flagged wallets, even inadvertently.