Fugitive Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor has ambitious plans for A7, a sanctioned Russian cross-border payment network co-owned by Shor himself and Promsvyazbank, a sanctioned Russian state bank repurposed to finance the country's defense industry.
A7 is hiring Spanish-speaking employees ahead of a planned Latin American expansion, Shor told RBC, a Russian business outlet. Apparently, that is only the beginning.
Ilan Shor
But there is a small compliance problem. Brussels and Washington have already barred people under their jurisdiction from doing business with Shor and A7.
The prospective customers imposed sanctions first
The U.S. sanctioned Shor in 2022 for election interference conducted "for or on behalf of, or for the benefit of, directly or indirectly, the Government of the Russian Federation."
- The Treasury Department said he had worked with Russian actors to undermine Moldova's government, stir political unrest and return the country to Moscow's sphere of influence.
It sanctioned A7 in August 2025 for having "materially assisted" Garantex, a sanctioned Russian crypto exchange whose domains and servers were eventually seized by U.S., German and Finnish authorities in March 2025, effectively knocking its original operation offline.
- The EU has also sanctioned Shor over his involvement in the "illegal financing of political parties" in Moldova and "incitement to violence."
- It added A7 to its blacklist in July 2025, saying the Moscow-linked company was connected to "efforts to influence" Moldova's presidential election and referendum on joining the EU.
On top of that, the bloc separately prohibited transactions involving A7A5, A7's ruble-backed stablecoin.
- Shor himself was sentenced in Moldova to 15 years in prison for fraud and money laundering and ordered to return more than $290 million.
- He lives outside the country and has described the verdict as politically motivated.
Apparently, there is no textbook
Even with sanctions piling up and blockchain investigators tracing billions through its network, Shor told RBC that A7 was not following an existing playbook but writing one from scratch.
"There is no university faculty that teaches this profession, and there are no books that could give us any academic experience," he said, adding that the company believed it was doing "a good, right thing."
Conveniently, A7 signed an agreement with Moscow's Higher School of Economics in June to improve fintech courses, involve company representatives in teaching and offer students internships.
But blockchain forensics firms have already proposed another name for the profession.
New York-based Chainalysis said A7A5 processed more than $93 billion in 10 months and described the system as infrastructure that "industrialized Russian sanctions evasion."
- More than $2.2 billion reportedly passed through a service converting the sanctioned ruble token into dollar-backed stablecoins, providing a bridge into the wider crypto market, the firm added.
TRM Labs, another blockchain intel firm, traced more than $166 billion in on-chain activity across the broader A7 network and found links to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, North Korean state hackers, Hamas and other sanctioned actors.
- Its findings included more than $65 million sent directly from an address attributed to the Iranian military organization and $5 million from Hamas.
So while the profession may not yet have its own university faculty, it does already have several sections in Western sanctions registers.