A7’s Swift sanctions evasion scheme moved $6.9 billion through global banks

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A sprawling financial investigation has pulled back the curtain on how A7 Swift sanctions evasion tactics allowed a Kremlin-linked fintech to push billions of dollars through some of the world’s biggest banks, despite years of sanctions meant to cut Russia off from global finance. According to the Financial Times, the company known as A7 funnelled more than $6.9 billion through the international banking system by exploiting a structural weak point in how Swift verifies who is actually sending money.

Key takeaways

A7, a Russian fintech backed by the Kremlin, moved over $6.9 billion through global banks despite sanctions on Russia.
The company relied on front companies and an industrial-scale forgery operation producing counterfeit invoices to disguise payments.
Standard Chartered Hong Kong alone received $1.1 billion from A7-linked entities between late 2024 and August 2025.
First Abu Dhabi Bank hosted accounts for 17 A7 entities that sent out more than $1.8 billion before the bank shut them down.
Standard Chartered, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank say they take anti-money laundering obligations seriously but declined to discuss specifics.

A7’s Sanctions Evasion Scheme Exploiting Swift Controls

A7 built its business by promising something Russian companies desperately needed after 2022: a way to move money across borders without touching the traditional Swift network that had shut them out. In practice, the FT’s reporting shows, that promise rested on old-fashioned money laundering dressed up as financial innovation.

How A7 Operated as an Alternative to Swift for Cross-Border Payments

When the United States and its allies cut Russian banks off from Swift following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow needed a workaround for paying overseas suppliers. A7 became that workaround, marketed by the Kremlin as the country’s flagship cross-border payments provider for imports. Chris Cook, the FT’s enterprise editor who worked on the investigation, described the pitch as combining “high-tech, new payment structures and crypto payments.” But he added a blunter assessment: “the reality is actually it’s a bit more old-fashioned than that. It’s money laundering.”

Rather than inventing a genuinely new payment rail, A7 leaned on the existing plumbing of international finance. It set up front companies in third countries, funnelled laundered cash into their bank accounts, and then used those accounts to settle payments on behalf of Russian clients dealing with counterparties elsewhere, including in China.

Forgery and Front Companies Tactics to Bypass Checks

The trickiest part of any laundering operation is answering the question a compliance officer inevitably asks: why does this account keep sending money to strangers abroad? A7’s answer, according to the FT, was an industrial-scale forgery operation that mass-produced fake paperwork, particularly invoices, to make the payments look like ordinary trade.

Cook summed up the mechanics simply: when banks probed suspicious activity, “A7 had an enormous forgery factory that was industrially producing fake paperwork, particularly invoices, to justify the payments.” The approach worked because of a specific feature of how Swift is built. Swift itself is only a messaging system between banks; it does not independently verify who is really behind a transaction. That job falls to the sending bank’s own customer checks. Beat those checks at just one member bank, and a payment can travel freely through the rest of the network. A7 exploited exactly that gap, making it the central mechanic behind the broader A7 Swift sanctions evasion pattern the FT uncovered.

International Banks Implicated in Processing A7 Payments

Multiple global banks unknowingly processed money tied to A7-linked entities over roughly a year, according to the FT’s review of leaked transaction files, with the sums varying sharply by institution and geography.

Payment Volumes Received by Various Banks

Between late 2024, when A7 was established, and August 2025, accounts at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong alone received $1.1 billion from A7-linked entities. DBS in Hong Kong was sent $273 million over the same window, while Citigroup clients received $74 million. In Europe, clients of Deutsche Bank were sent about $18 million tied to the same network.

These figures illustrate how the scheme spread risk across several jurisdictions rather than concentrating it in one bank or region, a pattern that made the flows harder to spot from any single institution’s vantage point.

Bank Responses to Involvement and AML Commitments

Standard Chartered, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank each told the FT they take anti-money laundering reporting seriously but declined to comment further on the specifics of the case. Cook noted that the banks named in the investigation said they had already identified the suspicious activity themselves and taken action against the customers involved.

One episode stands out as evidence that bank scrutiny did have an effect on A7’s behavior. When Standard Chartered grew suspicious about money flowing into customer accounts from Kyrgyzstan, that scrutiny was enough to force A7 to change its process, shifting more of its payment flow away from Kyrgyzstan and toward the United Arab Emirates instead. It is a reminder that even imperfect controls can push illicit networks to adapt, though not necessarily to stop.

Role of First Abu Dhabi Bank and Regulatory Actions

First Abu Dhabi Bank, the UAE’s largest lender, turned out to be one of the most heavily used channels in the entire network, hosting a cluster of accounts that moved billions in outbound payments before being shut down.

Accounts and Payments Linked to A7

A7 opened accounts at First Abu Dhabi Bank for 17 different entities, which together made more than $1.8 billion in outbound payments. The network also had access to accounts at JPMorgan Chase and DBS, extending its reach across multiple financial hubs in Asia and the Middle East.

Sanctions Application and Account Closures

First Abu Dhabi Bank told the FT that it had already identified and closed all of the A7-linked accounts, and that it seeks to apply US, UK, EU and UN sanctions in its compliance processes. That closure represents one of the clearest concrete enforcement outcomes to emerge from the investigation so far.

Why the Scheme Matters for Sanctions Enforcement

This episode exposes a structural tension at the heart of financial sanctions enforcement: Swift’s messaging network is only as secure as the weakest bank inside it. Cook framed the takeaway in stark terms, saying “if you can penetrate a bank that’s inside Swift, you can go quite a long way and send quite a lot of money.” For regulators and compliance teams, that is an uncomfortable admission, because it means sanctions leakage does not require breaking Swift itself, only fooling one link in a long chain of member banks.

There is a counterweight to that concern, though. Cook also pointed out that Russia “doesn’t seem to have an alternative to using this system,” suggesting that despite the scale of the A7 Swift sanctions evasion scheme, Moscow has not managed to build a truly independent payment rail free of western banking infrastructure. That leaves correspondent banking, however imperfect, as the main pressure point regulators can still tighten.

FAQ

How did Russian fintech A7 manage to bypass international sanctions using Swift?

A7 used front companies and an industrial-scale forgery operation with counterfeit invoices to exploit Swift’s controls, which rely on sending banks for customer verification.