The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed a civil forfeiture complaint Monday against approximately $61 million in cryptocurrency that prosecutors allege represents proceeds from black-market sales of sanctioned Iranian crude oil and petroleum products. The funds were intended to finance the Iranian government and its military, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organization, according to the filing.

The complaint names two Chinese companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, which prosecutors say used trading accounts at Binance to launder the money and funnel it to Iran, its agents and its proxies. Blessed Trust markets itself as a wealth management and virtual asset custody firm, Hexa Whale as a commodities brokerage. Both allegedly provided on-ramp services converting fiat into crypto, in some cases through U.S.-based issuers, and both count Chinese petroleum companies among their clients. Prosecutors say the two firms also moved tens of millions of dollars through the U.S. financial system.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

What the government says it has mapped is far larger than what it is trying to seize. Investigators identified a set of interrelated unhosted addresses, collectively called “Entity A,” that have received and distributed more than $1.5 billion in illicit Iranian oil proceeds, routing them to IRGC-linked money services businesses, IRGC-linked wallets and an Iranian exchange. Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale facilitated much of that flow through transactions designed to obscure the source and ownership of the funds, the complaint alleges.

For Binance, this lands on top of years of scrutiny over facilitating illicit flows. A Reuters investigation published in August alleged that an unlicensed Dubai exchange at the center of an Iranian sanctions-evasion operation sent Binance at least $676 million. The exchange is under a monitoring program it accepted as part of its 2023 guilty plea, which carried $4.3 billion in penalties for sanctions and anti-money-laundering violations.

The most recent complaint fits a wider campaign. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Iran’s largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, along with three other Iranian platforms in June. Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced plans for secondary sanctions targeting Iranian revenue from digital assets, technology, aviation, gold and shipping, an effort officials have described as an economic D-Day.

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