An unlicensed Dubai crypto exchange called Shelbit processed at least $4 billion in cryptocurrency since May 2024 and sat at the centre of a Persian-language gambling network of more than 2,000 websites.
Reuters reported that Shelbit operated from an office above a budget hotel in Dubai’s Deira neighbourhood and had no functional public website. Its address was listed as the exchange’s own, and the business was headed by Siavash Kayvanpour, an Iranian expatriate.
Shelbit’s main clients included the gambling network led by Pooyan Mokhtari and Sasha Sobhani. The two men had worked together since 2020, had been tried for creating illegal gambling websites called abt90 and Hazarat, and were sentenced in absentia to two years in prison in Iran. Kayvanpour received a three-month sentence for helping them.
Gambling is banned in Iran and Article 705 of the penal code carries up to six months in prison and 74 lashes. The law was expanded in 2023 to cover online betting, and Mokhtari denied wrongdoing, saying there were no written rules in Iran on the subject and that gambling was not illegal.
The report said the gambling network had access to Iran’s online payment system, which is tightly controlled by the central bank. Shelbit functioned as a hub through which the network, the central bank and other sanctioned entities gained access to global cryptocurrency markets.
Data on Shelbit’s fund flows, reviewed by two cryptocurrency investigation firms and the blockchain analyst Rich Sanders, showed at least $125 million flowed directly from Iran’s central bank to the exchange. The same amount, at minimum, came from a suspected cryptocurrency-mining operation via intermediary wallets designed to obscure the source of the funds.
Shelbit also transferred at least $676 million to Binance since May 2024. Roughly $540 million of that moved after Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority penalised Shelbit for operating without a licence, and VARA later confirmed it had taken action in 2025 and issued a warning at the end of July requiring the exchange to stop all unlicensed virtual-asset operations.
VARA said the information went beyond consumer protection and pointed to cross-border activity that could affect the integrity of the UAE’s financial system. Binance said it froze relevant accounts and reported them to authorities when compliance flags were triggered, while Rich Sanders said he had warned the exchange in 2025 about Shelbit’s links to Iran.
The investigation said the IRGC had taken control of Iran’s largest gambling websites in recent years and used them to move money abroad. John Wojcik of TRM Labs called it “by far the biggest Iranian illegal gambling network ever discovered and one of the biggest in the world.”
Reuters also said the operation was one of the largest Iranian sanctions-evasion networks uncovered since 2016, when the United States dismantled an about $20 billion IRGC-linked network. It was not known whether the IRGC had direct control over Shelbit and the gambling network, or where the cryptocurrency ultimately ended up.
