Iran: The US Says It Will Seize $1B of Tehran's Crypto This Week, After Claiming $1B in May

On the evening of 9 October 2026, on a stage in Washington, Scott Bessent told an interviewer that the United States was about to take another large bite out of Iran's money. "We're probably gonna seize a billion dollars of crypto this week," the US Treasury Secretary said. "We know where it is and we are isolating them."

The interviewer was Greta Van Susteren, and the venue was Newsmax's NPolicy Summit. Bessent was describing what he called an "absolute isolation campaign" against Iran: blockading ships in the Strait of Hormuz, closing land routes with the help of Pakistan and Turkey, and cutting the country off "in dollars, rials, or crypto". Iranian officials, he said, "can't go see their plastic surgeon in London, their girlfriend in Paris, and their money in Geneva."

Crypto here means digital money that lives on blockchains, public ledgers that record every payment, rather like a stock exchange tape that shows every trade but not the names of the traders. Iran has leaned on it for years because its banks are locked out of the world's payment systems. The American government now says it has found a way to take it back.

A billion, then half a billion, then a billion again

The figures do not line up neatly, and nobody in government has explained why.

On 29 April, Bessent told Larry Kudlow of Fox Business that the US had seized "nearly $500 million" in Iranian crypto. On 29 May, at the Reagan National Economic Forum in Simi Valley, California, he told Kudlow the number had doubled: "I believe that we have seized about $1 billion of their crypto. Just outright grabbed the wallets." He added that some Iranians "may be typing in right now, and they might not have realized that their wallet had been grabbed." According to The Block, a Treasury release issued shortly after that interview still cited the earlier estimate of nearly $500 million.

So when Bessent spoke of a billion dollars on 9 October, it was not clear whether he meant a new billion, the same billion he claimed in May, or the gap between his May number and the Treasury's own. He did not say. As of 10 October no seizure of that size had been announced, and the Treasury had published no running total of what it has frozen, seized or kept.

How a government grabs crypto

Bitcoin was designed so that nobody could take it without the owner's secret code, called a private key. Most of the Iranian money at stake is not bitcoin. It is Tether, or USDT, a stablecoin: a digital dollar issued by a private company, Tether, which promises that each token is worth one US dollar. That company can do something no bank customer would like. It can freeze any wallet holding its tokens, the way a bank can freeze an account, so the coins stay visible but cannot move.

Grabbing the money then takes three steps. First, analysts at firms such as Chainalysis and Elliptic follow the public ledger and tie wallet addresses to Iranian owners. Second, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the office that enforces American sanctions, adds the person, company or wallet address to its blacklist, and Tether freezes the tokens. Third, prosecutors go to court. A civil forfeiture complaint filed in Manhattan on 15 September 2026 shows how the last step works: a seizure warrant lets the FBI take custody by having Tether destroy the frozen tokens and issue the same amount of new ones to an FBI-controlled hardware wallet, a small device that stores the keys offline. The money is not moved. It is cancelled and printed again in American hands.

That case sought about $61 million in USDT that Tether had frozen across 10 addresses on the Tron blockchain in 2025. Prosecutors allege it came from black-market Iranian oil sold to Chinese buyers through two Hong Kong companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, which used accounts at Binance, the world's largest exchange. They say the wider network moved more than $1.5 billion to services linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran's elite military force, which the US lists as a terrorist organisation. Binance was not accused of wrongdoing and said it did not permit transactions with sanctioned people.

Coins held at an exchange, a company that works like an online stockbroker and keeps customers' coins for them, can also be frozen by that exchange on request. Bitcoin kept in a wallet whose keys sit only with its Iranian owner is the hard case. It can be blacklisted, which scares off anyone who might buy it, but it cannot be taken without the keys.

The freezes on the record

©CMZ chart. Data: The Block, Decrypt, Fox Business, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph

The war began on 28 February 2026, when the United States and Israel struck Iran. On 15 April Bessent announced Operation Economic Fury, a Treasury campaign to seize Iranian assets, freeze bank accounts and press other countries to cut ties with Tehran.

The first big crypto hit came on 23 April. Tether froze two Tron addresses holding $344 million in USDT, which CoinDesk reported had links to Iranian exchanges and to intermediary addresses tied to the Central Bank of Iran. "We will follow the money that Tehran is desperately attempting to move outside of the country," Bessent said.

On 2 June OFAC blacklisted Iran's four biggest exchanges: Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex, along with Nobitex's chairman, Amir Hossein Rad, and its chief executive, Seyed Ali Khoee. OFAC said Nobitex handled more than half of all crypto flowing into Iran in 2025. Elliptic put the four exchanges' combined business at at least $40 billion. A blacklisted company is cut off from the American financial system, and foreign firms that keep dealing with it risk the same treatment.

On 15 July OFAC listed four more Tron wallets linked to the Central Bank of Iran, and Tether froze about $131 million in them. Bessent put the figure at more than $130 million. On 7 August OFAC sanctioned Shelbit, an exchange that called itself Georgian but appeared to operate from Dubai, along with its operator, Siavash Kayvanpour, and an Iranian exchange, Aban Tether. Treasury said such exchanges helped the regime "launder billions of dollars". On 24 August the campaign was renamed Operation Economic Outcast.

On 17 September OFAC sanctioned BitBank, an exchange it said was controlled by Babak Zanjani, an Iranian financier already on its list. OFAC alleged that between June and July BitBank arranged bitcoin transfers worth hundreds of millions of dollars that reached the IRGC, and that the Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority, which collects tolls from tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, used it to pass money along. Its software developer, Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company, and three Zanjani associates were also listed.

Tether has frozen about $550 million in Iran-linked USDT during 2026, according to Cointelegraph. The two freezes with dates attached, in April and July, add up to $475 million.

Where the money goes

Seized coins do not go straight into the Treasury's bank account. They are held in custody until a court orders them forfeited, and owners can contest that. Under President Donald Trump's executive order of 6 March 2025, forfeited bitcoin goes into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a national stockpile the government has promised not to sell. Other forfeited crypto, Tether included, goes into a separate Digital Asset Stockpile.

Iran's crypto was a target before Washington got there. On 18 June 2025, during an earlier round of fighting, the pro-Israel hacking group Predatory Sparrow broke into Nobitex and sent more than $90 million to addresses with no usable keys, destroying it. That money is gone. What the US Treasury takes, it keeps, if the courts agree.