“This is by far the biggest Iranian illegal gambling network ever discovered and one of the biggest in the world,” said John Wojcik, a former researcher at Infoblox and now senior analyst at TRM Labs, who spent seven years investigating illegal gambling for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
It is also one of the largest Iranian sanctions-evasion networks discovered since 2016, when the U.S. broke up a roughly $20 billion IRGC gold-for-oil operation based in Turkey. Separately, the U.S. seized $1 billion in crypto from Iran in May.
“It’s an IRGC operation, and that’s plain as day,” Rich Sanders, an independent blockchain researcher and investigator focused on Iran, said of Shelbit. Reuters said it could not determine whether the IRGC directly controlled Shelbit or the gambling network.
The IRGC, founded in 1979, is the country’s most powerful and influential military, political and economic institution that answers directly to the country’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei.
Shelbit also interacts directly with Iran’s central bank, wallets linked to the IRGC by the Israeli government, and Nobitex, an Iranian exchange that the U.S. government sanctioned earlier this year after a Reuters investigation revealed its ties to the government. Some of the crypto flowing to Shelbit came from what the two investigative firms described as an Iranian bitcoin mining operation that creates new digital coins.
