US offers $15M for tips on Revolutionary Guards’ financial network

The US government is putting a $15M price tag on information that can unravel the financial plumbing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program announced the bounty on May 19, targeting the IRGC and its external operations arm, the Qods Force.

The ask is specific: actionable intelligence on how the IRGC moves money. That includes front companies, cryptocurrency accounts, and illicit oil sales conducted through what officials describe as a “shadow fleet” of tankers designed to skirt international sanctions.

A coordinated squeeze

The bounty didn’t arrive in isolation. The US Treasury simultaneously sanctioned the Amin Exchange and 19 vessels tied to transporting Iranian oil and petrochemicals. Each entity was linked to sanctions evasion efforts that funnel revenue back to the IRGC’s operations.

The RFJ program dangles a financial incentive for insiders and informants to come forward. The Treasury sanctions, meanwhile, try to choke off the channels that have already been identified. Together, they form part of what the US has branded its “Economic Fury” campaign, an escalating effort to cut the revenue streams that Tehran uses to fund proxy groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

The IRGC has been designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 2019, a classification that gives the US government broad authority to pursue its financial backers, facilitators, and logistics networks.

The Rewards for Justice program itself has paid out more than $250M since its founding in 1984 for terrorism-related information. Previous RFJ bounties have targeted IRGC-linked entities, including the drone production company KIPAS, which drew US attention during 2025 and 2026 for its role in supplying the corps with military hardware.

The crypto dimension

What makes this bounty particularly relevant to the digital asset space is the explicit mention of cryptocurrency accounts as part of the IRGC’s financial toolkit. The US government is publicly stating that the IRGC uses crypto infrastructure to move funds, and it’s willing to pay handsomely for details on how.

When the Treasury sanctions an exchange like Amin, it sends a signal to every other exchange that facilitating transactions tied to designated entities carries consequences. Compliance teams at major crypto platforms pay close attention to these designations because failing to block sanctioned addresses can result in enforcement actions from the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Tornado Cash, the Ethereum-based mixer sanctioned in 2022, became a cautionary tale for privacy-focused protocols that couldn’t or wouldn’t implement screening. More recently, enforcement actions have targeted individual wallets, exchanges operating in jurisdictions with weak oversight, and over-the-counter desks that facilitate large-volume conversions for sanctioned actors.

The $15M reward highlights something that often gets lost in crypto’s broader narrative about decentralization and censorship resistance. Governments aren’t just watching blockchain transactions. They’re actively recruiting informants to map the human networks behind those transactions. On-chain data can reveal wallet addresses and transaction flows, but it takes human intelligence to connect those wallets to specific individuals, front companies, and operational cells.

Blockchain forensics firms like Chainalysis and Elliptic have built entire businesses around tracing illicit flows, and their work frequently intersects with government investigations into sanctioned entities. A $15M bounty creates a powerful incentive for anyone with inside knowledge to bridge the gap between pseudonymous wallet activity and real-world identities.