FinCEN’s Financial Trend Analysis of October 2025 is the one published US count of Iranian shadow banking: about $9 billion of reported activity in calendar year 2024. The technique page on exchange-house and rahbar networks says how the system is described, and this note puts numbers on it. Every figure below is FinCEN’s. Where a number is calculated here, it says so.
What the dataset is
FinCEN reviewed Bank Secrecy Act reports on transactions that took place between 1 January and 31 December 2024 and that banks or FinCEN linked to potential Iranian shadow banking. It kept suspicious activity reports filed from February 2024 to July 2025, kept only transactions of $500,000 or more, and removed any where its own analysis could not corroborate a link to Iran. What remained was 2,027 transactions worth about $9 billion.
FinCEN’s own note on the data is worth keeping in view. A report shows only suspicious activity that was identified and reported, so it is not a complete picture of any type of activity. It may include completed and attempted transactions, inbound and outbound, and transfers between accounts. It can cover both legal and illicit activity by the same subject. The percentages below therefore do not add to 100, because one transaction can be counted under several kinds of company and under both its sender and its receiver.
Who transacted
| Kind of company | Value | Share of the $9bn | Where it sat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iran-linked oil companies | about $4bn | 44% | UAE 60% of these funds, Singapore 25% |
| Likely shell companies | about $5bn | 56% | Sent about $4.2bn, 89% of it from Chinese non-resident accounts of Hong Kong entities; received about $4.3bn, 72% by UAE shell companies |
| Shipping companies | about $707m | 8% | Iraq 36%, UAE 20%, Hong Kong 18% |
| Investment companies | about $665m | 7% | UAE about $399m (60%), UK about $239m (39%) |
| Technology-procurement companies | about $413m | 5% | Oman 44% (about $182m), Hong Kong 25% (about $103m), China 13% (about $54m) |
FinCEN’s reading is that the oil companies are front companies that “appear to be” Iranian, and that shell companies “exist only on paper”. These are classifications FinCEN made from reported activity. They are not findings about any named company.
Where it happened
| Jurisdiction | Value | Share of the $9bn |
|---|---|---|
| UAE | about $6.4bn (received about $5.6bn) | 71% (received 62%) |
| Hong Kong | about $4.8bn (sent about $4.4bn by wire) | 53% (wire share 49%) |
| Singapore | about $2.2bn | 24% |
| United Kingdom | about $540m | 6% |
| Switzerland | about $115m, plus about $503m by foreign companies with Swiss accounts | 1%, plus 6% |
FinCEN says 99 per cent of the UAE-based companies in the dataset were in Dubai. Of the Hong Kong companies, FinCEN says 82 per cent of the funds belonged to likely shell companies and 81 per cent used Chinese non-resident accounts.
One more number matters for how to read the rest. A relatively small number of companies, 166, conducted 95 per cent of the activity in the dataset. The structure FinCEN describes is therefore a few hundred paper companies, used repeatedly, not thousands used once.
Where the UK and Oman appear
The two places are named because they are the ones that get mentioned in discussions of this subject, so it helps to see what the record says.
United Kingdom. FinCEN found UK-based companies transacting about $540 million, “primarily between investment companies potentially linked to Iran and other investment companies”. It says UK- and UAE-based investment companies, at about $665 million in all, were potentially providing Iranian entities access to international investment trading, “potentially including foreign commodities futures markets”. Its examples include a UK investment firm that sent about $10 million to a UAE oil company OFAC later designated as an Iranian front, and a UK shipping company that sent $29 million to a UK law firm to buy an oil vessel that OFAC later designated for shipping Iranian oil. Separately, Treasury’s April 2026 release designates three UK-based companies as fronts of Shahr Bank’s rahbar network, and says one of them transferred over $70 million for Iranian crude oil through 2024.
Oman. In FinCEN’s data Oman appears as the home of companies that received money in what FinCEN calls potential technology procurement, about $182 million of the $413 million in that category. Calculated here, that is roughly 2 per cent of the $9 billion. Its case study is an Oman-based company that received about $30 million from two Hong Kong shell companies between January and March 2024.
Neither entry describes a bank holding Iranian credits.
What Treasury adds
FinCEN’s dataset is one year of reported activity through US correspondent accounts. Treasury’s releases are about named networks and use different measures. They describe the 35 persons designated on 28 April 2026 as facilitating “the movement of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars”, and say of the networks that they “handle tens of billions of dollars’ worth of trade each year” (1 May 2026). These are not the same quantity as FinCEN’s $9 billion, which is only what reached US banks as reported transactions of $500,000 or more. The documents do not reconcile the two, and this note does not.
| Date | Action | Point to note |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Jun 2025 | Zarringhalam exchange houses | First round against shadow-banking infrastructure under the 2025 maximum-pressure memorandum; FinCEN issues its advisory the same day |
| 9 Jul 2025 | 22 entities in Hong Kong, UAE, Türkiye | Oil-payment fronts for the IRGC-Qods Force; second round |
| 28 Apr 2026 | 35 entities and individuals | Rahbar companies of several banks; UK-registered fronts; Treasury warns on “toll” payments for Hormuz transit |
| 1 May 2026 | Three exchange houses and their fronts | Two owners hid Iranian ties behind citizenship by investment |
| 10 Jul 2026 | A financier and further exchange houses | Exchange houses holding foreign currency for sanctioned banks |
| 7 Aug 2026 | Shahr Bank currency networks | Described by Treasury as its eighth shadow-banking action of 2026 |
| 24 Aug 2026 | Operation Economic Outcast launched | Five sectoral determinations, including digital assets and gold, widening secondary-sanctions exposure |
| 15 Oct 2026 | Iraqi bank, offshore banks, exchange houses | Access to US dollars through an Iraq-based bank; two Iranian offshore banks |
What the record does not contain
We searched the three FinCEN documents and the eight Treasury releases cited here for the following words: “repo”, “repurchase”, “synthetic”, “bond”, “vostro”, “nostro”, “collateral” and “London”. None appears in any of them. The documents do not describe Iranian energy credits being swapped at an Omani bank, packaged into synthetic bonds, or used as collateral on London repo desks. They also do not give any figure for the effect of a stoppage in these flows on liquidity in any financial centre.
That absence does not prove such a thing never happened. It means no primary document cited here supports it, and this site publishes only what a primary document supports. Claims about the structure of Iran’s financial dealings that come with no document, no named institution and no filing, and that attribute events to hidden factions, are not evidence, however widely they are shared.
What the figures do not mean
They are not the size of Iran’s trade. The $9 billion is what banks reported and FinCEN kept. FinCEN says reporting should not be taken as a complete picture.
They do not show wrongdoing by every company in them. FinCEN says counterparties may be “witting or unwitting”, and that one filing can mix legal and illicit activity.
Designation is a finding, not a verdict. Treasury’s descriptions of what a named company did are the agency’s account. The releases give amounts as ranges, such as “tens of millions”, without the records.
The picture is dated. The data cover 2024. Treasury has taken at least eight shadow-banking actions in 2026, and the sets of named companies change from one release to the next.