Binance internal investigators identified VIP accounts they said helped channel more than $1 billion to wallets tied to Iran-linked entities, including one account registered to a 79-year-old Chinese resident and another linked to a suspected Iranian gold smuggler, according to an in-depth report by Fortune published Thursday.
The report, based on documents reviewed by the magazine, said the transactions took place as Iran increasingly turned to cryptocurrency in early 2025 to blunt the effect of sanctions. One VIP Binance account registered to the elderly Chinese user transferred $439 million in digital tokens from the exchange to an outside wallet, which then forwarded most of the funds to wallets investigators later linked to sanctioned organizations associated with Iran, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Binance investigators viewed the activity as suspicious given the account holder’s age, the scale of the transactions, and the use of Tether on the Tron blockchain, a payment method the report said is favored by cybercriminals and money launderers. Yet the transfers did not initially trigger alarms at Binance, despite the exchange’s agreement in late 2023 to adopt stricter compliance measures under a $4.3 billion plea deal with the U.S. government, Fortune said.
“This is not merely a red flag, it is an immediate escalation trigger,” Amanda Wick, a former federal prosecutor and head of Americas at crypto compliance software company VerifyVASP, told Fortune.
Binance later blocked the 79-year-old user’s account in September 2025 and offboarded it in January 2026, according to the report. The activity had begun in January 2025, but compliance staff only flagged it after a law enforcement request from the Seychelles on August 11 related to “a serious case involving terrorism financing.”
Former Binance staffers ultimately concluded that around $400 million from the elderly trader’s account had indirectly reached a cluster of previously unidentified Iran-linked wallets outside Binance that investigators labeled “Entity A.” Those wallets, the report said, received $1.7 billion in total from businesses and individuals with Binance accounts.
Entity A then sent part of those funds to Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange, and to wallets linked to U.S.-designated terrorist groups including the IRGC and the Houthis.
Investigators described the pattern as part of a broader “Chinese nexus,” which included a second VIP trader, a 38-year-old Chinese woman who sent nearly $200 million in Tether to an intermediary wallet between November and December 2024. That intermediary then relayed the funds to Entity A. According to the report, Binance later offboarded that account in January 2026.
The documents reviewed by Fortune also indicated that the two VIP accounts may have been accessed from the same device, raising questions about whether they were controlled by the same person or by a third party. Investigators also found that both accounts had received funds from Blessed Trust, a Hong Kong-based company that helped firms convert crypto into fiat and also handled back-office functions for Binance, including payroll and taxes.
The news outlet also described a separate set of transactions involving two suspected Iranian nationals. One account, opened in 2021, belonged to a 44-year-old with a Dominica ID listing Iran as his birthplace and whose name appeared in a 2020 United Nations Security Council report on a gold-and-cash smuggling network for Iran and North Korea.
The second account belonged to a 37-year-old using an Iraqi ID that also listed Iran as his birthplace.
Read more at Fortune