Incredible.

First, money laundering is beautiful (#1455164) and your pearl-clutching omg, so bad is complete bullshit (#1453638, #1467656) wrapped in economic illiteracy. #1540813

Second, it's not bitcoin or hawala networks they're using to circumvent sanctions and "launder" funds it's... oh no... the established correspondent banking system!

Standard Chartered, Citigroup and other international banks have handled billions of dollars from a Kremlin-backed fintech company that tricked its way into the global financial system with a vast document forgery operation.
...how it used old-fashioned money laundering to funnel more than $6.9bn through the international banking system despite sanctions on Russia.

"The Kremlin has touted A7 as the country’s flagship provider of cross-border payments for imports since Russian banks were cut off from the Swift system after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022."

It's almost like sanctions don't work ("work"...) and that we shouldn't use them #1520959.

At least three entities were based in the UK, where A7 was placed under sanctions in May 2025. One entity in Hungary appears to have been the critical conduit for payments into the EU.

How to do money laundering, Russian style

Practically, how the funds made their way around sanctions and other soft "blocks" was via cash deposits and Chinese bank accounts:

Under the A7 scheme, front companies arrange for cash to be deposited at banks within the Swift system, which can then be used to settle bills abroad for Russian companies. Chinese bank accounts were the final destination for just over half of the flows.

A former US banking analyst is quoted saying "the material 'should make us think again about how hard it is to keep traditional correspondent banking clean'."

A7 put considerable effort into cheating anti-money laundering checks by banks. The front companies would produce documents, forged in advance, that created a paper trail designed to obfuscate real transactions. This included a library of thousands of corporate stamps, some of which are fakes while others have been harvested from real documents from unknowing companies. The front companies were given instructions on how to portray the types of goods they were buying so as not to raise alarms. For instance, employees were told to replace customs codes for goods under sanctions with the closest possible alternatives that were not subject to sanctions.

Beautiful:

The fintech company exploits controls in Swift that depend on the sending bank performing adequate checks on customers. Beating the controls of any member bank clears the way for A7 to send payments through the system. In the early stages of its scheme in late 2024 and early 2025, A7 sent large volumes through three Kyrgyz banks: Eldik, Aiyl and Eurasian Savings Bank (ESB).

archive: https://archive.li/Qb3hX