US designates Russia's A7 network a criminal group, targets A7A5 token

Victoria Shinder02 October 2026, 17:422 min read

The US Treasury has moved against the A7 Network, a Russian shadow-banking operation it says Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have used to evade sanctions, Decrypt reports. The Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the network a significant transnational criminal organisation on Thursday, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed a rule that would cut off its front companies from the US financial system, including in crypto.

FinCEN is acting under section 9714 of the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act, which offers six special measures. It chose the sixth, a prohibition on transmittals of funds, rather than the fifth, which restricts correspondent accounts. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs noted that the fifth would have left a gap, because transactions in A7's token move outside correspondent banking entirely. The sixth reaches fiat and crypto alike, and the proposed rule would bind roughly 348,000 institutions, crypto exchanges among them. Comments close 30 days after publication in the Federal Register.

The token, A7A5, is ruble-backed, issued by Kyrgyz-registered Old Vector, live on Tron and Ethereum, with deposits at Promsvyazbank, Russia's state-owned defence bank. FinCEN describes a mirror system: tokens move between addresses inside Russia to represent payments abroad, while the network's front companies, which it calls Sub-Agents, make matching fiat transfers in dollars, yuan, dirhams and euros. According to FinCEN, more than 180 entities processed at least $179.1 billion in A7A5 between February 2025 and June 2026, historically almost all of it through the sanctioned exchanges Garantex and Grinex, with the token often used as a bridge into USDT. On the fiat side, hundreds of Sub-Agents held accounts at about 435 institutions in at least 83 countries and processed more than $17 billion.

Treasury links the network to firms involved in Iranian sanctions evasion, to the Iranian exchange Nobitex and to laundering of proceeds from North Korean exchange hacks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said those who facilitate illicit finance for America's adversaries "will lose access to the U.S. financial system".

Why it matters

The choice of measure is the news for crypto: a transmittal ban that names convertible virtual currency means exchanges, not only banks, would have to screen for A7's counterparties. It also shows regulators treating a ruble stablecoin as payment infrastructure, which is how its designers used it.