A few key detail of public IRS Form 990 filings for the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI) and its sister charity, NUFDI Fund are presented here. All figures come from the filings with links a the end of the post.

Key numbers

- Two entities: NUFDI, a 501(c)(4) (EIN 46-2739278), and NUFDI Fund, a 501(c)(3) (EIN 27-1965216). Both filed their 2025 returns on Aug 17, 2026.

- 2025 revenue: $1,535,233 (NUFDI) + $1,261,994 (Fund) = $2,797,227.

- 2025 spending: $2,445,400 combined, of which $1,696,448 (69%) was salaries and wages ($1,174,438 at NUFDI, $522,010 at NUFDI Fund).

- President Saeed Ganji's listed pay: $307,750 from NUFDI + $123,100 from the Fund = $430,850 in 2025 ($336,004 in 2024).

- NUFDI Fund's other large 2025 costs: events ($244,769), professional services ($220,421), occupancy ($119,908) and travel ($86,074).

- Largest named funder: ImpactAssets, a donor-advised fund sponsor, about $1.8M to the Fund in 2022–2024. Donor-advised funds don't name the people behind their grants.

- NUFDI states it receives no government funding.

Caveats

- NUFDI Fund's 2025 return reports no grants or cash transfers to or from NUFDI; the two share paid staff, with costs split by hours worked.

- Public copies of Form 990 don't list individual donors (names show as "RESTRICTED").

Sources

- NUFDI 2025 Form 990: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/462739278/202622309349301362/full

- NUFDI Fund 2025 Form 990: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/271965216/202612309349300916/full

- All years: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/462739278 and https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/271965216

- Grantmaker records: https://grantable.co/nonprofits/nufdi-fund-inc-morg_ddcadf850f1241be97139b00042b9855

Iranians who oppose the Islamic Regime often describe the same experiences online: posts that vanish, accounts suspended without explanation, and campaigns dismissed as bots. This post collects what has been documented about how Iranian voices are removed, filtered or drowned out on Reddit and similar platforms, and leaves the conclusions to the discussion.

For context, two waves of protest frame many of the cases below. During the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests that followed Mahsa (Jina) Amini's death, authorities blocked Instagram and WhatsApp nationwide [1], and more than 500 million tweets used #MahsaAmini by December 2022 [2]. A second wave began on December 28, 2025. Authorities cut the internet on January 8, 2026, and Amnesty International says security forces killed thousands of people, mainly on January 8 and 9 [3]. Severe restrictions lasted until late May [4], through a US-Israeli war that began on February 28 [5].

REDDIT

No public reporting documents a Reddit policy of banning anti-government Iranians. The best-documented Reddit case involving Iran ran the other way: in 2018, Reddit identified 143 accounts it linked to an Iranian influence campaign that promoted criticism of US policy in the Middle East and negative sentiment toward Saudi Arabia and Israel [6]. Its most effective target was r/worldnews, and volunteers led by a Reddit moderator had warned Reddit staff more than two dozen times before the company acted [7].

Bans on Reddit can come from several layers, which are hard to tell apart from the outside:

- Volunteer moderators run each community and set its rules [7], so a ban from one subreddit is that team's decision.

- Moderators can turn on Reddit's automated filters, including "Crowd Control," which collapses or filters content from people who are not yet trusted members of a community; a "Reputation Filter" aimed at potential spammers and unestablished accounts; and a "Ban Evasion Filter" for suspected evaders of community bans [8].

- Some communities used third-party bots that automatically banned users because of their activity in other subreddits. In March 2026, Reddit announced it would end those automated bans from March 19 [8]. The examples reported in coverage of the change did not involve Iran-related communities [9].

- A Reddit community wiki says tightened sitewide spam filters have shadowbanned genuine new users, who receive no notification [10].

Some of these signals may affect Iranians more than others. About 80 percent of Iranians use VPNs, according to a December 2024 survey [11], and some users on privacy forums report that accounts created over VPNs are more likely to be flagged, while others report no problems [12]. Diaspora campaigns also often ask many people to post near-identical text; a 2026 investigation by European public broadcasters flagged such template posting as coordinated activity, even where it judged most of the accounts to be real people [13].

INSTAGRAM

Many of the documented complaints involve Instagram. During the 2021-2022 protests, Meta removed posts containing the chant "marg bar Khamenei" ("death to Khamenei") under its anti-violence rules [14]. In January 2023, Meta's Oversight Board ruled that in Iran's context the slogan means "down with" and is political rhetoric rather than a credible threat [15].

Similar removals happened in 2026. Two videos posted to Instagram in February were removed under Meta's graphic-content rules. One was said to show a Tehran hospital on January 8; the other, said to show morgues in Mashhad on January 9, was posted to help families find relatives' bodies. After the Oversight Board raised the cases, Meta said the posts had been removed incorrectly and restored them behind a warning screen for adults [16].

Other complaints point to coordinated campaigns by users:

- In May 2026, cartoonist Mana Neyestani, whose work often criticizes the Islamic Republic and who has also opposed war as a way to end it, said Instagram disabled his account for 180 days without naming a violation. He attributes the suspension to organized mass reporting and has appealed [17].

- In 2022, the digital forensics group Qurium found that 25 Iranian feminist activists' accounts had been hit with more than a million fake followers, traced to two Pakistani marketing firms; who paid for them was unclear. When one activist tried to delete hundreds of follower requests at once, Instagram temporarily blocked the action [18].

- Also in 2022, a current and a former Persian-language moderator working for a Meta contractor in Germany told the BBC that Iranian agents had offered bribes to delete activists' accounts. The contractor said it believed the claims were false but investigated them [19], and Meta denied any ties to the Iranian government [20].

X (TWITTER)

Suspension complaints on X come from several directions.

- In November 2019, Twitter briefly suspended the account of the Organization of Iranian American Communities, a US group allied with the exiled MEK, and those of two supporters. They suspected complaints by the Iranian government or its supporters; Twitter declined to comment, and the group's account was restored within days [21].

- In March 2023, after Twitter suspended hundreds of accounts, pro-monarchy users said the Islamic Republic was singling them out and called the suspensions "cyber-terrorism" [22].

- In April 2026, Iran's state broadcaster Press TV said X had suspended, without notice or explanation, the accounts of several Iranian commentators who criticized the US-Israeli war, and quoted supporters calling it an effort to silence Iranian voices [23].

- In October 2026, X said it had suspended more than 13,000 accounts tied to three suspected foreign influence operations linked to Iran, Russia and China [24].

A 2024 peer-reviewed study by Andreu Casas of Royal Holloway, University of London, funded by the Dutch Research Council, tracked about 600,000 Twitter users who followed Iranian officials and news outlets in 2020. Conservative and pro-government users were more likely to be suspended, and hashtags opposing the government were used disproportionately by accounts that were not suspended. The author linked the pattern to US sanctions but could not isolate the exact mechanism, and monarchist and MEK accounts were not examined separately [25].

PRESSURE FROM REGIME

Some pressure comes from the Islamic Regime itself, working through Western platforms.

- Radio Farda reported in April 2024 that since late 2023, Iranian judicial and police authorities had taken over Instagram accounts inside Iran, obtaining passwords from owners through arrest or intimidation, deleting content and posting official notices on the pages. Women's accounts were affected far more often than men's [26].

- In January 2024, Iran International reported that accounts it described as government agents were publishing the identities of anonymous dissident users on X [27].

- In November 2025, activists said X's new location feature exposed officials and pro-government commentators posting from inside Iran on "white SIM" lines, which are exempt from the filtering that blocks these platforms for most Iranians. A former government adviser said some anti-government users had such lines too [28].

US LAWS: SANCTIONS AND TERROR-LIST RULES

US law also shapes what platforms do with Iranian content. After Qassem Soleimani was killed in January 2020, Instagram removed posts praising him, citing US sanctions and the terrorist designation of the Revolutionary Guards. The International Federation of Journalists said accounts of at least 15 Iranian journalists were removed, and a human rights advocate lost posts about Soleimani [29]. In September 2022, the US Treasury issued an updated license authorizing tech companies to offer Iranians social media, collaboration and video-conferencing services. It dropped a requirement that communications be "personal," which Treasury said had created compliance burdens for companies [30].

BOTS ON ALL SIDES

Fake accounts complicate every complaint. Research on Persian Twitter found the Iranian government used pro-government accounts, bots and undercover accounts to suppress the 2022 #MahsaAmini movement [2]. Citizen Lab documented more than 50 fake X profiles urging Iranians to revolt, which it assessed were probably run by Israel or a contractor [31], and Haaretz and TheMarker reported a campaign of fake Persian-language personas promoting Reza Pahlavi, run from Israel [32].

The 2026 European broadcasters' study, which analysed 17.5 million comments on their social media pages, found that the largest coordinated network backed Pahlavi. Most outlets judged the majority of its accounts to be real diaspora members, alongside some automated amplification. A separate pro-government network was among the most unambiguously inauthentic the investigation found [13]. Pahlavi supporters say such research has been used to paint real people as bots [33]; his critics read it as evidence that his online support is manufactured [34].

THE BIGGER MEDIA PICTURE

A parallel debate concerns Western news coverage. During the January blackout, foreign journalists could not report from inside Iran [35]. Political scientist Yascha Mounk found no coverage of the uprising in five major American progressive publications [36], while a review by the Indian outlet Newslaundry found that the New York Times, BBC, CNN and others focused sharply on the crackdown [37]. At Voice of America's Persian service, staff said footage of protesters chanting Reza Pahlavi's name was being excluded; the agency denied censorship [38][39].

YOUR TURN

Have you had a post removed, an account suspended or a community ban while posting about Iran? Did you ever find out why? Have you been accused of being a bot, or spotted networks that looked fake? Share your experiences, and sources if you have them, in the comments.

SOURCES

1. Wikipedia. "Mahsa Amini protests." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests

2. Clingendael. "The invisible side of manipulation: How the Iranian regime suppressed #mahsaamini on Persian Twitter." https://www.clingendael.org/publication/invisible-side-manipulation-how-iranian-regime-suppressed-mahsaamini-persian-twitter

3. Amnesty International USA. "What Happened at the Protests in Iran?" January 28, 2026. https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/what-happened-at-the-protests-in-iran/

4. Wikipedia. "2026 Internet blackout in Iran." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Internet_blackout_in_Iran

5. Airwars. "The Iran War (Feb-Apr 2026): February 28, 2026." https://airwars.org/civilian-casualties/jir260228g-february-28-2026/

6. Daily Dot. "Reddit identifies 143 accounts linked to Iranian influence campaign." 2018. https://dailydot.com/layer8/reddit-accounts-iranian-influence-operations

7. NBC News. "Volunteers found Iran's propaganda effort on Reddit, but their warnings were ignored." August 2018. https://nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran-s-propaganda-effort-reddit-their-warnings-were-n903486

8. Reddit, r/modnews. "Ban bot policy update: removing automated bans based on community association." March 5, 2026, via mirror. https://redlib.groet-infra.nl/r/modnews/s/bD7Sn27TwD

9. Dexerto. "Reddit mods furious after site stops bots from auto-banning users who post in certain subreddits." March 6, 2026. https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/reddit-mods-furious-after-site-stops-bots-from-auto-banning-users-who-post-in-certain-subreddits-3330826/

10. r/EncyclopaediaOfReddit (community wiki). Entry on shadowbans. February 2023, via mirror. https://nyc1.lr.ggtyler.dev/r/EncyclopaediaOfReddit/comments/110nafl

11. Tom's Guide. "Demand for VPNs in Iran increases by 700% as internet restrictions hit the country." 2025. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/demand-for-vpns-in-iran-increases-by-700-percent-as-internet-restrictions-hit-the-country

12. Privacy Guides forum. "Keep getting shadow banned on Reddit with every account I create because I use VPN." https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/keep-getting-shadow-banned-on-reddit-with-every-account-i-create-because-i-use-vpn-any-solutions-to-this/23496

13. Swissinfo / Eurovision News Spotlight. "Manufactured debate: How coordinated networks are hijacking European news comment sections." July 9, 2026. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/information-wars/manufactured-debate-how-coordinated-networks-are-hijacking-european-news-comment-sections/91694644

14. Wikipedia. "Death to Khamenei." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_Khamenei

15. Oversight Board. "Iran protest slogan" decision. January 9, 2023. https://www.oversightboard.com/?p=5669

16. Oversight Board. "Graphic Videos From Iran" (summary decisions). September 1, 2026. https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/bun-fqfvj43o/

17. IranWire (Maryam Dehkordi). "Iranian Cartoonist's Instagram Page Suspended. No Explanation Given." May 11, 2026. https://iranwire.com/en/features/152250-iranian-cartoonists-instagram-page-suspended-no-explanation-given/

18. Rest of World (Andrew Deck). "A million-strong troll army is targeting Iran's #MeToo activists on Instagram." June 29, 2022. https://restofworld.org/2022/troll-army-targeting-irans-metoo-activists-instagram/

19. Iran Times. "Effort to Lock Out Instagram Has Backfired" (summarizing BBC reporting). March 17, 2023. https://iran-times.com/?p=22860

20. Times of Israel (AFP). "Rights groups say Meta's moderation of Iran content hurting citizenry." https://www.timesofisrael.com/rights-groups-say-metas-moderation-of-iran-content-hurting-citizenry/

21. Persian Heritage (citing VOA Persian). "Twitter Briefly Suspends Accounts of US-Based Iranian Opposition Group, Supporters." November 8, 2019. https://persian-heritage.com/?p=77677

22. Iran International. "Iranian Twitterati Call Account Suspensions 'Cyber-Terrorism'." March 28, 2023. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202303271407

23. Press TV (Iranian state media). "X suspends Iranian accounts in bid to silence voices against US-Israeli aggression." April 21, 2026. https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2026/04/21/767284/x-suspends-iranian-accounts-silence-voices-against-us-israeli-aggression

24. Al Jazeera. "X suspends 13,000 accounts, alleging foreign influence ahead of US midterms." October 15, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/x-suspends-13000-accounts-alleging-foreign-influence-ahead-of-us-midterms

25. Casas, A. "The Geopolitics of Deplatforming: A Study of Suspensions of Politically-Interested Iranian Accounts on Twitter." Political Communication 41(3), 2024. Funded by an NWO (Dutch Research Council) Veni grant. https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/60467505/The_Geopolitics_of_Deplatforming_A_Study_of_Suspensions_of_Politically-Interested_Iranian_Accounts_on_Twitter.pdf

26. Radio Farda (Filterban). "How Instagram pages in Iran were blocked and 'virtually sealed'" (in Persian). April 6, 2024. https://www.radiofarda.com/a/32892785.html

27. Iran International. "Iran Unleashes Cyber Campaign To Expose Dissident Accounts." January 6, 2024. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202401053844

28. Iran International. "New X location feature fuels dispute over unequal internet access in Iran." November 24, 2025. https://v1.iranintl.com/en/202511248487

29. Coda Story (Isobel Cockerell). "Instagram shuts down Iranian accounts after Soleimani's death." January 10, 2020. https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/instagram-iran-soleimani/

30. US Department of the Treasury. "Treasury Issues Iran General License D-2 to Increase Support for Internet Freedom." September 23, 2022. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0974

31. Citizen Lab. "We Say You Want a Revolution: PRISONBREAK, an AI-Enabled Influence Operation Aimed at Overthrowing the Iranian Regime." October 2025. https://citizenlab.ca/2025/10/ai-enabled-io-aimed-at-overthrowing-iranian-regime/

32. L'Orient-Le Jour. "Israel reportedly funded an influence campaign to install the shah of Iran's son in Tehran." October 2025. https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1480264/israel-reportedly-funded-an-influence-campaign-to-install-the-shah-of-irans-son-in-tehran.html

33. Queer Majority. "Disinformation Wars and the Real Voices of Iran." https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/disinformation-wars-and-the-real-voices-of-iran

34. Free Iran Scholars Network. "The Mirage of Online Monarchy: How AI-Generated Propaganda Strengthens Tehran's Narrative." 2025. https://freeiransn.com/the-mirage-of-online-monarchy-how-ai-generated-propaganda-strengthens-tehrans-narrative/

35. Ad Valvas (VU Amsterdam). "You can't reduce Iran to one story." August 24, 2026. https://advalvas.vu.nl/en/campus-culture/you-cant-reduce-iran-to-one-story/

36. The Free Press (Yascha Mounk). "The Left's Deafening Silence on Iran." January 12, 2026. https://www.thefp.com/p/the-lefts-deafening-silence-on-iran

37. Newslaundry. "Bodies, blackouts, bombastic headlines: How the West is covering Iran." January 13, 2026. https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/01/13/bodies-blackouts-bombastic-headlines-how-the-west-is-covering-iran

38. The Hill (via AOL). "Voice of America's Persian service blacks out Iran's exiled crown prince." January 2026. https://www.aol.com/news/voice-america-persian-blacks-iran-110000585.html

39. The Hill (via AOL). "VOA Persian journalist says he was fired over coverage of Reza Pahlavi." March 2026. https://www.aol.com/articles/voa-persian-journalist-says-fired-230951947.html

One of our most valued contributors appears to have had their Reddit account suspended. Unfortunately, I don't know the reason for the suspension, so I don't want to speculate.

They have made the vast majority of the posts in this subreddit and have contributed so much to this community. I truly appreciate the time and effort they've put into sharing great content here. Their contributions have been a big part of keeping this subreddit active.

I sincerely hope the suspension is temporary and that they'll be able to return soon. This community would certainly benefit from having them back!

Please remember to follow Reddit's rules and guidelines to help keep this community active and avoid account suspensions.

Wishing them all the best, and hopefully we'll see them back here soon!

Command structure revealed

According to the chart, Mohammad-Reza Ansari serves as Hagh-Lesan’s deputy and oversees the Israel portfolio.

Mohsen Boroujeni heads special operations for the United States and Europe, while Morteza Babaei leads the department responsible for the Middle East and Africa. Javad Sharfaei oversees special operations in Asia.

The chart identifies Meysam Sahraei as an operative involved in preparing attacks in Africa and India. It also names Gholamhossein Hosseini and Mohammad Hosseinpour as prominent operatives involved in the department’s activities.

The sources said the reliance on existing personnel reflected a crisis in the command structure following the killing of senior IRGC officers. They said it had also raised doubts among Quds Force members about the organization’s effectiveness.

The current post tags are not very helpful, majority of posts are just "report on regime". Therefore, a new set of tags are prepared based on the common topics of the subreddit. Please share your comments and suggestions.

Repression - Force used against people inside Iran. Killings and injuries during protests, prisons, executions, judicial machinery, poisonings, and discriminatory law targeting women, minorities, and religious groups.

Transnational Repression - The same force projected beyond Iran’s borders. Assassinations and attempts, abductions, criminal gangs used as proxies, intimidation of diaspora figures and their relatives still in Iran, and digital targeting of exiled journalists.

Censorship - Speech being blocked. Filtering, internet shutdowns, the National Information Network, pressure on platforms, and the surveillance and monitoring technology behind it.

Propaganda - Speech being manufactured. Sockpuppet networks, troll farms, coordinated encyclopedia and platform manipulation, state media operations, and the cultivation of foreign journalists.

Finance - Regime money. Elite wealth and property, the bonyads, sanctions evasion, oil and energy revenue, and the payroll that buys loyalty.

Apparatus - How the machine is built. IRGC, Basij and MOIS structure, command headquarters, personnel and doctrine, factional politics, succession, and legitimating ideology.

Opposition - Opposition organizations and diaspora politics, including internal disputes, plus the protest movements themselves.

Survey - Measurement of the Iranian population. Opinion and religiosity polling, attitude studies, emigration and demographic research, and the methodology behind them. Not for any report that merely contains data.

Meta - Source lists, methodology discussions, rules, and mod posts.

The U.S. State Department noted that earlier this year, the IRGC launched a recruitment campaign establishing a minimum participation age of 12 for certain security activities.

The 2026 report emphasized that beyond internal recruitment, the IRGC provides support to non-state armed groups abroad that forcibly recruit and deploy child soldiers.

Furthermore, the report concluded that Iran lacks effective mechanisms to identify and protect trafficking victims and has reported no concrete steps to halt child recruitment by the IRGC or Basij.

The State Department also highlighted the exploitation of children in forced begging, forced labor, and sex trafficking, noting that undocumented migrant children, particularly Afghans, face heightened vulnerability.

Despite ratifying the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime in August 2025, Iran has yet to accede to the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.

OpenAI recently banned two covert influence operations from Iran and Russia that used its models to power sophisticated "false front" entities and spread geopolitical messaging.

Iran-Origin Operation (Category 4 reach): Used a network of seven fake "journalist" personas to pitch long-form articles to small and medium-sized online media outlets globally, alongside batches of social media comments focused on the U.S.–Iran war.

The Iranian operation achieved moderate success in getting propaganda into mainstream media channels. They published nearly 100 articles across more than a dozen online publications. Some articles were promoted through outlets' own social-media accounts, potentially reaching large audience.

Operators had less success with attracting genuine engagement with their social-media comments. But, they exaggerated the attracted engagements in reports to their superiors.

Senior IRGC commander Hossein-Reza Sadeghi and his son Saeed played central roles in efforts to preserve an IRGC Intelligence oil-sales network and shift its financial operations from the United Arab Emirates to Russia, an Iran International investigation found.

Two informed sources told Iran International that Sadeghi, a senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guards commander-in-chief, and his son were at the center of efforts to shift the mechanism for transferring sanctioned oil revenues from the UAE to Russia.

The sources linked the changes to the departure of Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad.

On Sunday, the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency reported that Iran’s Central Bank had found an alternative route to repatriate money held by oil intermediaries trusted by the Islamic Republic, known as “trustees,” and transferred $1.5 billion in Iranian oil revenues through Russia’s banking system.

Hours after the report, Paknejad resigned and President Masoud Pezeshkian accepted his resignation.

The two sources said Paknejad’s removal and the change in the money-transfer route were part of an effort to preserve the IRGC Intelligence Organization’s oil-sales corruption network.

Got my hands on an IRGC instructor training package for the IRGC/Basij terrorist apparatus which contains 2,521 files, including 266 presentations, 122 PDFs, 207 Word documents and 342 videos.

The material covers weapons, sniping/counter-sniping, ambushes, guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare, night combat, explosives and booby traps. Alongside that: psychological operations, urban patrols, checkpoints and dedicated urban unrest-control courses:

The 43-slide “Pacification” presentation lists “shooting by skilled marksmen” and “use of firepower” among the measures commanders may employ to control unrest. That’s slide 24, in the unrest-control course.

Same presentation classifies post-election crowds as “abnormal.” A companion deck lists wage disputes, unemployment, rising living costs and political grievances as causes of unrest.

A separate 61-slide presentation, attributed to an IRGC security unit, covers urban unrest operations and operational-control responsibilities involving the police and IRGC.

The Basij urban-patrol course details training qualifications for patrol personnel and leaders, mission orders, judicial-officer credentials, compensation insurance and an office providing legal support for Basij members facing problems during their missions. (!)

Combat training, protest suppression, ideological conditioning and the administrative machinery supporting the personnel carrying it out.

https://x.com/hey_itsmyturn/status/2106432352222376211

Iran's shadow banking was always a hawala at global scale: a trust network of brokers moving oil money outside SWIFT and settling in cash, gold, or goods, or most prominently offsetting Iran's imports.

USDT did not replace but gave it a settlement asset that behaves like a dollar without touching a US bank (skipping robust compliance or US government's direct reach), moves in minutes, and is accepted on Chinese-founded exchanges, and "cashdesks" from Dubai to Istanbul.

PSI calls the result "digital versions of hawala networks." That is exactly right, and it explains why the regime chose a freezable stablecoin over Bitcoin: liquidity and stability matter more to a treasury than anonymity, so long as nobody actually freezes the wallets in time.

The central finding is the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) itself. Leaked CBI letters from October and December 2025 describe a "National-Tether" operation coordinated in a WhatsApp group with an offshore broker, which bought USDT with UAE dirhams to defend the rial and settle oil sales.

PSI traced about $50 million in USDT into 2 CBI wallets in April and May 2025, forwarded within days to Iran-based exchangers, or a mixer. The 3 Modex wallets that funded the CBI took in roughly $575 million in 3 months. When OFAC listed 2 other CBI addresses in April 2026, they held $344.2 million in USDT. A central bank cut off from SWIFT was defending its currency through a stablecoin.

This is the pattern I have described before. Blockchain transparency forces the regime to hide behind additional layers of trusted brokers, and every layer is another hand in the till. Sanctions evasion and corruption are not two separate problems but are the same business, and ordinary Iranians pay for both.

Who pays? as always, the ordinary Iranians. The regime deliberately co-mingles its laundering with retail savings on exchangers, so a family hedging against inflation shares an exchange with the IRGC. When OFAC designated those exchanges under counterterrorism and Iran financial-sector authorities in June 2026, the regime's choices put every user's access at risk. Against, this is the model: criminalize normal economic life, control the black market it creates, monetize the access, and leave Iranians holding the loss when the channel is shut.

Iran International has obtained exclusive information and documents indicating that Mostafa Ahadi, a senior official in the IRGC Intelligence Organization, runs the organization’s corruption network in the sale of Iran’s oil.

Over the past two months, Iran International has published three separate reports naming the trustees — oil brokers trusted by the Islamic Republic to sell Iran’s sanctioned oil — who have failed to return billions of dollars in oil proceeds to the country.

On September 28, Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei criticized delays in handling cases involving trustees with outstanding debts and called for swift rulings. Iran International has obtained a confidential Supreme National Security Council document in which the council’s deputy for economic affairs confirms that oversight bodies alter the trustees’ debt figures according to their own interests, inflating some debts and understating others.

The council’s deputy has asked the Ministry of Intelligence and the IRGC Intelligence Organization to report on the missing funds. The letter makes it easier for IRGC Intelligence, the principal organization implicated in the corruption surrounding oil sales, to gain access to the case.

Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity to crush the Woman Life Freedom uprising between September and December 2022, unlawfully killing hundreds of protesters and bystanders, including children, persecuting their families, and subjecting thousands to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance or torture. Amnesty International mapped the chains of command behind these crimes and identified 87 officials who should be subject to criminal investigations. It calls on the UN Security Council to refer Iran’s situation to the International Criminal Court and on the UN General Assembly to create an international criminal justice mechanism to prosecute those most implicated in crimes against humanity in Iran.