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.
A secret recording from a clandestine sting operation reveals the plans of financial experts enlisted to help former Venezuelan oil ministry official Carmelo Urdaneta move the illicit money and bypass international banking controls.
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.
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.
Enhance or Eliminate? How AI Will Likely Change These Jobs
Research by Suraj Srinivasan finds that employers are seeking more AI-related skills in certain fields, while demand for structured and repetitive tasks is waning. Find out which roles will be augmented or automated in this interactive graphic.
Featuring Suraj Srinivasan. By Ana Elena Azpúrua on February 20, 2026.
Enhance or Eliminate? How AI Will Likely Change These Jobs
Will generative AI replace your job or improve it? What has been the impact on the labor market so far?
After the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, job postings for occupations that involve lots of structured and repetitive tasks, likely replaceable by generative AI, decreased by 13%. Meanwhile, employer demand for jobs that require more analytical, technical, or creative work—potentially enhanced by artificial intelligence—grew 20%, according to a working paper coauthored by Harvard Business School Professor Suraj Srinivasan.
The findings offer early clues for how companies are adopting generative AI, which has sparked a corporate search for efficiency and existential dread among employees. The research team assessed job postings from 2019 through March 2025 using a large dataset that covers nearly all US vacancies.
“Rather than solely eliminating jobs, generative AI creates new demand in augmentation-prone roles, suggesting that human-AI collaboration is a key driver of labor market transformation,” says Srinivasan. The largest reductions were in the finance and technology sectors.
Srinivasan, the Philip J. Stomberg Professor of Business Administration, collaborated on the working paper “Displacement or Complementarity? The Labor Market Impact of Generative AI” with Wilbur Xinyuan Chen, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Saleh Zakerinia of Ohio State University. The paper was first released in December 2024 and was updated in August.
Occupations with potential for AI augmentation handle tasks that can be automated using generative AI alongside other tasks that require human involvement. Those most prone to augmentation tend to involve greater use of social and hands-on technical skills.Microbiologists, financial analysts, and clinical neuropsychologists are three examples with high augmentation potential. In finance, as Srinivasan explains, investment managers and analysts use AI-powered tools to process and evaluate market data, but ultimately, their judgment and decision-making remain crucial.
The research team used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to categorize over 19,000 job tasks across more than 900 occupations, assessing their potential for automation through generative AI. They also constructed an augmentation score based on the share of exposed and unexposed tasks in each occupation.
The number of skills required for roles prone to automation are shrinking, the researchers found. They registered 7% fewer of those skills in job postings and also fewer skills emerging in these occupations. At the same time, they detected more AI-related skills—such as prompt writing or using AI tools—in jobs with high augmentation potential. As workflows transform with the new technology, new skills have also emerged.
The researchers note that the study focuses on the short-term impact of generative AI on the US labor market, so the effects on other regions or long-term impacts “remain uncertain as adoption scales.”
How companies integrate generative AI technologies is decisive for job loss or growth, the paper warns. Given that it impacts jobs differently, Srinivasan recommends that companies:
Invest in reskilling programs to transition workers to roles enhanced by AI. “Retraining is essential for jobs where generative AI is reducing skill diversity. In automation-prone occupations, workers may face displacement unless they develop non-automatable skills, such as judgment and interpersonal communication skills.”
Continuous upskilling in generative AI to leverage new tools. “In augmentation-prone occupations, generative AI is broadening skill requirements, increasing the demand for AI literacy, human-AI collaboration, and domain-specific AI applications.”
“Firms should view generative AI as an augmentation tool rather than merely a cost-cutting measure and align workforce training programs accordingly to support both job transitions and evolving skill demands,” says Srinivasan.
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