U.S. DOJ says $1.5 billion in Iranian oil proceeds moved through Binance-linked accounts

The U.S. Department of Justice says Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale Trading were not what they claimed to be: one posed as a digital asset manager and custodian, the other as a commodities broker, while both allegedly acted as conduits for fiat money tied to Chinese buyers of Iranian oil. For high-risk PSPs, the important part is not the branding; it is the mix of exchange accounts, non-custodial wallets, and banks used to move funds across the chain.

1. According to the DOJ, assets were withdrawn from corporate Binance accounts and then moved through a network of non-custodial wallets. Some of the funds allegedly ended up at Iranian crypto venues, including Nobitex, which the source describes as the largest, while other transfers went to companies linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
2. The investigators say the funds moved through a complex chain of addresses designed to make transaction tracing harder. In practice, that is the part compliance teams care about: layered wallet hops, exchange touchpoints, and entity names that do not match the underlying flow of value.
3. The DOJ also said that American banks were used in transactions worth tens of millions of dollars alongside the crypto venues. That matters because this was not a pure-crypto rail story; it was a hybrid flow where fiat and on-chain movement appear to have been stitched together.
4. U.S. prosecutors did not charge Binance itself. Binance said it blocked the Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale Trading accounts and ended service to those companies before the DOJ’s public announcement, and added that it follows a “zero tolerance” policy for sanctions violations and cooperates with U.S. law enforcement.
5. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported that Babak Zanjani used Binance as part of a payment network that financed Iranian authorities, citing among other things compliance data from Binance itself. That earlier reporting now sits in the background of a case where exchange records, sanctions exposure, and bank rails are all in the same picture.

For PSPs serving high-risk verticals, the practical takeaway is straightforward: exchange accounts alone are rarely the whole story. If a flow combines corporate crypto accounts, non-custodial wallets, bank transfers, and counterparties tied to sanctioned sectors, the operational risk is not just at onboarding — it shows up in monitoring, beneficiary screening, and what your team can actually explain to the bank when the questions start.