OFAC, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, designated eight people and five companies on 29 May for a scheme that impersonated American small businesses to defraud US technology vendors and supply Iran's military. 1 The target was a procurement ring run for SAIRAN, Iran's state-owned military-electronics manufacturer that operates procurement under the SAAFTA trading name, a firm controlled by MODAFL, Iran's Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics. The goods were spectrum analysers and non-linear junction detectors: the equipment a counter-surveillance unit uses to sweep a room for hidden microphones.
Ali Majd Sepehr set up domains posing as real US companies and tricked dozens of American IT vendors into shipping hardware, then re-routed it through two Dubai fronts, Green Light Computer Co LLC and Al Kawther Neon LLC, into Iran. 2 A Rome-based dual Iranian-Italian national, Saeid Zahedi, ran the money through a US financial account to pay for domain registration. That US account and the vendor fraud move the case from sanctions evasion, an administrative matter, into wire fraud, a federal crime. The FBI Los Angeles field office and the Commerce Department co-ordinated the action, and the State Department posted a $15 million Rewards for Justice bounty on IRGC financial networks. 3
This was OFAC's third distinct Iran track in two weeks. Previous rounds hit the Persian Gulf Strait Authority and more than 50 shipping entities , and the Hengli refinery licence lapsed without guidance . This one reaches the defence-electronics supply chain instead. The non-linear junction detectors named are TSCM-grade tools, the kit a service uses to find listening devices, suggesting MODAFL is hardening internal security after losing senior commanders to strikes inside a single week. A mid-tier procurement designation reads as routine Treasury housekeeping on its own. Paired with Bessent's sanctions threat against Oman the same week, it reads as a maximum-pressure pattern timed to the unsigned memorandum.
