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The Cat and the Stock-Footage CEO: How a Digital Trail Helped Unmask an Iranian Money Machine

Investigation

A woman named Elizabeth Newman supposedly runs two U.K.-registered crypto exchanges. But she appears to be a corporate fiction used as a front for a convicted embezzler whom the United States has accused of moving billions of dollars’ worth of digital assets on behalf of Iran’s repressive regime.

Banner: James O’Brien/OCCRP

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Reported by

OCCRP

February 27, 2026

On paper, Elizabeth Newman is a financial titan behind two U.K.-based cryptocurrency exchanges that claim to process more than a billion dollars’ worth of digital assets every day.

To believe U.K. corporate records and a promotional video, the short-haired Dominican in her 40s maintains a global footprint, listing correspondence addresses ranging from a beachfront Caribbean property to London’s charming Covent Garden and a 68-story skyscraper in Dubai.

But in reality, this person doesn’t seem to exist at all. 

An OCCRP investigation has discovered that the woman presented to the world as the director of these two major crypto firms is actually a stock-footage model. While the U.K.’s business registry accepted her as a “person with significant control” over the companies, reporters found no evidence of a physical person corresponding to the Elizabeth Newman described in filings. 

Newman’s companies were listed as “dormant” in official corporate filings. But U.S. authorities allege they were active engines for Babak Zanjani, a notorious Iranian financier sanctioned last month for providing financial backing for major projects that support the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Iranian regime more broadly. 

By allowing Newman to front these entities, the U.K. provided a veneer of Western legitimacy to a crypto network alleged to have helped bypass global financial blockades.

Iran had sentenced Zanjani to death for embezzlement of state oil funds in 2016, but he has bounced back into favor with the country’s hardline Islamist authorities; his sentence was commuted in 2024 and he was formally released last year.

Credit: Ali Shirband/Mizan News Agency

Babak Zanjani at the Revolutionary Court of Tehran, Iran on November 1, 2015.

The U.S. Treasury claims he was freed to launder money for the very regime that had imprisoned him. It describes his two exchanges, Zedcex and Zedxion, both registered as U.K. companies, as part of an operation helping the IRGC bypass sanctions, moving billions of dollars’ worth of funds through a global financial hub with total anonymity.

The exchanges are among the latest in a sophisticated toolkit Tehran uses to make and receive payments. TRM Labs, a blockchain analytics company, said in a January report that cryptocurrencies appear to play an increasingly prominent role in the financing of the IRCG, a military organization that doubles as a multi-billion-dollar business empire and enforces the agenda of Iran’s theocratic regime.

In January the IRGC played a leading role in violently quashing nationwide protests in which thousands were killed, rights groups reported.

TRM Labs reported that the Zedcex and Zedxion crypto exchanges also handled millions of dollars in transfers from the IRGC to a man the U.S. accuses of financing a Yemeni armed group responsible for attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Credit: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/NurPhoto via AFP

The burned East Tehran General Directorate of Tax Affairs headquarters in the aftermath of protests in Tehran, Iran, on January 21, 2026.

Zedcex and Zedxion have processed approximately $1 billion in funds linked to the IRGC, according to TRM Labs’ analysis of crypto wallets attributable to the exchanges’ operations. 

In the weeks following the mass protests, Western governments have scrambled to choke off funding for the IRGC and other Iranian state bodies.

“Treasury will continue to target Iranian networks and corrupt elites that enrich themselves at the expense of the Iranian people,” said U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a January 30 statement where his department applied sanctions on Zanjani and the two U.K. crypto exchanges.

“This includes the regime’s attempts to exploit digital assets to evade sanctions and finance cybercriminal operations.”

In response, Zanjani said on the social media site X that the U.S. accusations were “merely a pretext for seizing 660 million Tether [U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin crypto assets], and extortion.” He has not directly confirmed or denied having a connection to the firms. 

Zanjani did not respond to questions about his role in the crypto exchanges. OCCRP sent questions addressed to Elizabeth Newman to both Zedcex and Zedxion, but received no response.

The Stock-Footage CEO

Both exchanges have said on their websites they are directed by a woman named “Elizabeth Newman,” but despite a months-long search, OCCRP was unable to find any real-life individual matching the “Elizabeth Newman” persona.

An official Zedxion marketing video from March 2022 featured an image of a woman called “Elizabeth” — identified as the platform’s “executive director.”

That woman, in fact, was a stock-footage model from a video titled “Pretty black woman talking to camera” available on Shutterstock.

The same video named the firm’s supposed finance administrator as “Smith” and team leader as “Muhammad,” but their images were also stock footage.

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John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. Prof. Mearsheimer argues why Iran should be considered a rational actor, and why Iran should develop nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent.

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