Binance's own investigators had him filed under high-value customers. On the world's largest crypto exchange, his trades looked wrong. He was doing business with an Iranian money changer. Then U.S. and Swiss law enforcement asked the exchange about one of his accounts. Someone was logging into it from Tehran.
The customer turned out to manage a crypto firm run by Babak Zanjani. U.S. and Israeli authorities describe Zanjani as a financier for Iran's government who ran a secret payment network for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Journal reported in May that Zanjani's web of accounts and shell companies made $850 million in transactions on Binance to get around U.S. sanctions. Now Angus Berwick and Patricia Kowsmann have seen an 80-page Binance report, prepared in April for the United Arab Emirates' financial intelligence unit. With other records, it details 21 trading accounts in the network. The network set up shop after Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to U.S. anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations.
The first member the investigators found was Sukhrob Oimakhmadov, 47, a Tajik business associate of Zanjani. From 2023 his account took in more than $10 million from wallets Israel's Defense Ministry later tied to the Guard. He passed the money on to other Guard-linked wallets, the report says. Binance blocked his account in October 2025 and removed him this May. The same device had logged into a second account, held by a U.A.E. arm of the crypto firm Zedcex. Between 2024 and late 2025, Binance's systems caught it being accessed from Tehran more than a dozen times. It made almost $830 million in transactions, including $56 million withdrawn to wallets Israel says belonged to the Guard.
Blocked in November, sanctioned in January
Swiss police asked Binance about Zedcex in March 2025 for a fraud case. The Drug Enforcement Administration subpoenaed the account. The FBI sought data last November, and Binance says it blocked the account that month. Treasury sanctioned Zanjani and Zedcex in January. A Turkish payment firm in the network, ZedPay, helped turn Iranian oil sales into crypto, Israeli officials said. Its CEO held a Binance account, as did 10 employees and associates, and Treasury sanctioned the firm and him in July. A director at a Tehran oil-and-gas firm used Binance to create tokens that traded on Zedcex, the report says. One was called NIOC, the initials of the National Iranian Oil Company. Binance says every account tied to sanctions breaches was blocked and then removed. “Binance continues to cooperate with law enforcement,” a spokesperson said.
Our read
Consumer Protection (M11) and Investments and Risk (IN04). Nothing in our 81 model books is a crypto coin or a crypto exchange, so there's no position to report. Anyone who keeps coins on an exchange is trusting that exchange's controls. This is a record of the largest one finding a sanctioned network on its books, years after a guilty plea for the same kind of failure. The findings are Binance's own and the authorities'. Binance says it blocked and removed the accounts. With crypto, the platform is a risk on its own, separate from the price of the coin.
So the verdict is Avoid. It's aimed at leaving savings on an exchange, and at no one company. If you own crypto at all, keep it small and in a wallet you control. An exchange that gets frozen, fined or shut doesn't ask you first. The same goes for any account that holds your money through someone else's software. Know the name on the account, what protects it, and how you'd get the money out in a week if the app won't open. That's a review question, and the time to ask it is a calm Tuesday, well before the storm.