US Treasury sanctions eight Canadian money brokers for Iranian sanctions evasion, several also laundered for drug kingpin Ryan Wedding

The US Treasury has sanctioned eight Canadian money services businesses for allegedly facilitating financial transactions for sanctioned Iranian entities, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declaring that "Canada cannot be a safe haven for illicit financial facilitators that provide sanctions-evasion services to the Iranian regime and its proxies."

The designated companies — including Million Exchange, NIA Nations Currency, Farah Exchange, Darvish Exchange and several numbered corporations — are based in Ontario and British Columbia. According to the Treasury, they exchanged Iranian rials and other currencies for digital assets, and several conducted transactions with sanctioned Iranian digital asset exchanges and cryptocurrency addresses linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The action was coordinated with Fintrac, Canada's anti-money laundering watchdog.

Several of the same firms also moved money for Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympic snowboarder turned alleged drug kingpin, who Treasury says laundered millions in drug proceeds through digital asset transfers before his arrest in Mexico in January. Wedding now awaits trials in March and October next year on drug trafficking and murder charges. This week a Mexican judge was arrested on allegations he accepted a two-million-dollar bribe to grant bail to Andrew Clark, the Canadian alleged to have been Wedding's second-in-command.

The designations are part of Operation Economic Outcast, launched in August to disrupt Iran's financial channels. In a parallel action, FinCEN issued an order barring US financial institutions from processing transfers involving MEXC Global, a cryptocurrency exchange incorporated in Seychelles that Treasury alleges facilitated at least $16 billion in illicit transactions linked to sanctions evasion by Iran, North Korea and Russia, as well as cybercrime.

Bessent framed the choice in binary terms: "Financial institutions cannot have it both ways: Either you support the Iranian regime, or you have access to the U.S. financial system."

Treasury's own description of the landscape, though, explains why the designations will thin rather than stop the traffic. Canada, the department noted, is "home to hundreds of money services businesses that enable the movement of funds into and out of Iran" — through cash-based value transfer and by converting cash into digital assets to send across borders. Eight were sanctioned this week.