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.
