The Treasury Department on Thursday designated the A7 Network, a Russia-linked shadow banking system it says Iran has used to evade sanctions, as a significant transnational criminal organization. The step extends U.S. sanctions from several A7 companies designated in August 2025 to the network as a whole, and it was paired with a proposed rule from Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, that would prohibit fund transfers involving A7's so-called sub-agents.
Treasury announced the measures under Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign the British government has welcomed as part of efforts to increase pressure on Iran. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department "is dismantling the financial infrastructure that allows Iran and other adversaries to evade sanctions, move illicit funds, and undermine the integrity of the global financial system." Anyone who facilitates illicit finance for America's adversaries, he warned, "will lose access to the U.S. financial system."
The Office of Foreign Assets Control's sanctions list now carries the network with locations in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria and Zimbabwe and an establishment date of 2024. Any property or interest in property it has in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons, including transactions involving sub-agents acting for it, is now blocked, and U.S. persons are generally barred from dealing in that property unless OFAC authorizes it or an exemption applies.
Treasury says A7 was created and backed by people already under U.S. sanctions in order to evade them, and that it built a global web of sub-agents: companies designed to make payments tied to sanctioned sectors and persons look like ordinary commerce. The network also relies on falsified trade documents, falsified import and export records and misleading descriptions of goods, the department said, and A7 staff control the sub-agents' websites and bank accounts, reaching them through custom-built virtual private networks that hide where they are.
The network's leader, according to Treasury, is Ilan Shor, whom the department calls a sanctioned and convicted criminal fraudster. Shor, a Moldovan politician, was convicted in a $1 billion bank fraud case, CoinDesk reported in August 2025. That month OFAC sanctioned A7 LLC, its subsidiaries A71 and A7 Agent, and Old Vector, the Kyrgyzstan-based issuer of A7A5, a ruble-backed token the agency said was created for Russian users of A7's cross-border settlement platform. Treasury now describes that token as part of the A7 Network, created so its members could evade sanctions and transact internationally. A7 itself has promoted its payment services as a way to reduce reliance on Western correspondent banks.
By its own account, A7 was processing more than 2,000 transactions a day as of January 2026 and claimed a total transaction volume above 7.5 trillion rubles, about $91.5 billion, a figure Treasury equated to roughly 13 percent of Russia's foreign trade transactions in 2025. FinCEN's investigation found that the sub-agents handled more than $17 billion worldwide between January 2025 and June 2026.
Much of Treasury's case concerns Iran. The department said the same sub-agents that enable Russian illicit finance opened pathways for Iran's central bank, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran-backed terrorist groups to move money through the international financial system. One sub-agent dealt directly with entities in Iran's "shadow fleet," the tankers, shippers and front companies that move and sell Iranian oil, and it and a sister company received nearly $140 million from entities involved in Iranian sanctions evasion, according to Treasury. Another sent about $1.6 million to a company linked to Iranian sanctions evasion and weapons procurement. The department also accused the network of financially supporting the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian proxies such as Hamas, tied it to Nobitex, Iran's largest digital asset exchange, and said it had facilitated transactions connected to North Korean hacks of cryptocurrency exchanges.
Washington's action follows a nationwide alert on A7 that Britain's National Crime Agency and the British government issued on Aug. 31, the first such alert aimed at A7. The British announcement said the network depends on third-country financial institutions to complete cross-border transactions and circumvent sanctions, has been linked to Iranian state-associated actors and claims to have settled more than $86 billion in transactions in its first year. Britain had already sanctioned A7, and in May it targeted banks, entities and individuals linked to it, with a focus on enablers in Central Asia and West Africa.
Alongside the proposed rule, FinCEN issued an alert giving financial institutions a list of red flags for spotting A7's activity. The transfer prohibition itself is only a proposal for now: the bureau issued it under section 9714(a) of the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act, and the public comment period will close 30 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register.