Omri Raiter, CEO of Rakia, a company that detects patterns in cryptocurrency movements using legally obtained or open-source signals, began his remote interview with The Gateway Pundit by saying that the area of the Middle East he was calling fromwas being bombed. “This is not standard,” he joked, but it had been going on for over a week. His firm is tracking financial movements in and out of Iran, and he has detected a major uptick since the war began.

Raiter made clear, for compliance purposes, that the information he was providing was from open-source intelligence that he and his company have been tracking and analyzing, looking for anomalous movements of cash. “It’s a non-secret that there’s lots of crypto moving around the IRGC.”

Iran’s IslamicRevolutionary Guard Corps(IRGC), the military force that reports directly to the ayatollah, uses cryptocurrency to fund its operations and to support proxy terrorist groups such as the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas. According to the largest and most respected crypto research firms, Iran has a crypto ecosystem ofabout $8 billion, around 50 percent of which is controlled by state entities, including the IRGC.

Many people mistakenly believe that cryptocurrency is untraceable, but it is actually extremely traceable because every transaction is assigned a unique identifier, known as a transaction ID or TXID, along with the sender’s and receiver’s wallet addresses, all of which are permanently recorded on a public ledger.

Some platforms require less verification and documentation than others, and these are the ones preferred by terrorists and criminals. So, the ownership of the coins may not be clear, but the movement is. And this is how Raiter knew that money was moving in and out of Iran, by checking the IP addresses sending and receiving crypto and the many stops the crypto sometimes makes along the way.

Raiter said the pattern was very straightforward. “We saw a movement of millions, tens of millions going to hundreds of millions,” he said, explaining that this activity began in the first hours of the war. According to him, the transfers appeared to originate from Iranian accounts. Some were already known accounts, while others were unidentified but were being accessed from Iranian IP addresses.

“Something very interesting happened,” Raiter added. He explained that the Iranian government shut downthe country’s internet, a move that would normally halt most online activity. However, his team observed what they call the “blackout paradox.”

“The whole country’s internet is out. There is no Twitter, no Facebook, no nothing.” Yet despite the blackout, the blockchain data showed continued activity. “We see more than 1,000 crypto nodes of transfer still communicating to the internet,” Raiter said.

Glancing at his screen, Raiter said the activity had been happening all morning. “Right now, there is no internet, and the nodes are communicating. Only the government can control that.” He said the explanation was simple: the transfers were government-controlled.

“And I’m talking about wallets with an overall value of over three billion U.S. dollars,” he said. Raiter explained that he was reading directly from a map displayed in his system, which showed more than 1,000 active crypto transfer nodes.

Source: The Gateway Pundit