Iranian betting network helped move $4,000 million in sanctions-evasion crypto through Dubai office

Reuters says one of the world’s largest illegal betting networks routed millions of dollars in cryptocurrency through a Dubai office tied to Shelbit, an unlicensed exchange run by an Iranian expatriate. For high-risk PSPs, the important part is not the gambling angle by itself; it is that the same rails touched the Iranian central bank, sanctioned or exposed wallets, and major crypto venues.

1. The Dubai office sits above a budget hotel in a run-down neighborhood and is the registered address of Shelbit, a crypto exchange operating without a license, according to data shared by two crypto research firms and an independent analyst and reviewed by Reuters.
2. One of Shelbit’s biggest customers is a Persian-language betting network with more than 2,000 websites, led by two Iranian influencers with reported high-level government connections. One operated from an expensive villa in Madrid, while the other, until recently, was based in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong.
3. The two men and the Iranian who runs Shelbit were convicted as accomplices in an illegal gambling case in Iran in 2023. Gambling is banned in the Islamic Republic and punishable by flogging and prison, yet Reuters says the betting network has access to Iran’s online payment system, which is closely supervised by the country’s central bank.
4. Shelbit sits at the center of an Iranian money-movement operation through which the betting network, the central bank, and other authorized Iranian entities can access global crypto markets. The two research firms and Rich Sanders, an independent blockchain investigator focused on Iran, analyzed Shelbit flows and said the exchange has processed at least $4,000 million since May 2024.
5. Decades of millions of dollars in crypto from the betting network can be traced through blockchain records to Shelbit. The exchange has also moved hundreds of millions to major crypto players including Binance, and it interacts directly with Iran’s central bank, wallets linked by the Israeli government to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Nobitex, and a bitcoin mining operation that the two research firms describe as Iranian.

Shelbit’s flows continued as tensions rose ahead of the war with the United States and Israel in February, and the crypto kept arriving even after the Islamic Republic was hit by the conflict, according to the Reuters reporting. For banks, acquirers, and PSPs, this is the practical warning: a betting merchant, a crypto exchange, and state-linked Iranian counterparties can all end up in the same transaction chain.