U.S. Sanctions Georgia’s Shelbit and Iran’s Aban Tether Over Alleged IRGC Crypto Transfers

The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Georgian crypto exchange Shelbit and Iranian exchange Aban Tether, saying both were used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to launder money and evade U.S. sanctions. For high-risk PSPs, the useful part is not the headline itself but the operating pattern: exchanges, stables, and cross-platform flows are now part of the sanctions perimeter, not just the banking rails.

1. The Treasury Department said more than $2 million was transferred from Shelbit accounts to a digital address linked to the IRGC. Shelbit denied the allegations, and its website says the exchange stopped operating in January.
2. Aban Tether was accused of processing transactions worth millions of dollars for the IRGC together with other U.S.-sanctioned exchanges, including Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex. That matters because the sanctions action is not framed as a single-counterparty case; it is a network case.
3. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department will continue to increase economic pressure and will identify and dismantle illegal financial networks supporting the Iranian regime, whether the value moves in dollars, rials or crypto.
4. The Treasury also pointed to earlier action against Nobitex, which it sanctioned on 2 June 2026. In that case, the department said Nobitex handled more than 50% of all digital asset inflows from Iran in 2025, helped with payments tied to Iranian terrorist activity, and gave regime-linked users access to international digital-asset exchanges.
5. The Wall Street Journal reported on 25 June 2026 that CoinEx had processed more than $3.84 billion linked to sanctioned Iranian entities since 2019, including transactions with Nobitex, Wallex, Ramzinex, Bit Pin and Aban Tether. It said roughly 6.2 million individual transfers were involved, making CoinEx Nobitex’s largest external counterparty.

For PSPs, the operational takeaway is straightforward: sanctions exposure in crypto is increasingly about transaction chains, counterparties and shared infrastructure, not just the named exchange on the front end. If a merchant or partner sits anywhere near those flows, the due diligence question is no longer academic.