Iran War and Sanctions Evasion

A cyber‑intelligence report reviewed by Fox News Digital alleges that cryptocurrency wallets linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continued operating through a nationwide internet blackout after the Feb. 28 U.S.–Israeli strikes, moving what analysts describe as tens of millions of dollars in the first hours and ultimately hundreds of millions out of the country. Omri Raiter, CEO of Israeli firm RAKIA, says his team tracked real‑time blockchain flows and found that IRGC‑connected wallets received more than $3 billion in crypto over 2025, and that Iran’s broader crypto ecosystem saw about $7.78 billion in activity that year, citing internal data and Chainalysis figures. RAKIA’s analysis contends that the same crypto “corridors” are being used both to finance Iranian proxy groups in places like Lebanon and Yemen and to facilitate personal capital flight by regime‑connected individuals, suggesting a resilient sanctions‑evasion infrastructure that functions even amid communications shutdowns and kinetic attacks. The article notes that the U.S. Treasury on Jan. 30 sanctioned several Iran‑linked crypto exchanges in one of its first platform‑wide actions against digital‑asset venues, but the reported post‑strike flows raise questions about how effective those measures have been in constraining Tehran’s access to hard‑to‑trace funding during the current war. On social media, crypto analysts are split between warning that the story underscores long‑standing gaps in U.S. sanctions enforcement and criticizing the report as opaque, since its underlying wallet‑attribution methods and datasets have not been independently verified.