An Iranian investor prevented by American sanctions on his cryptocurrency activities turned to Turkey to establish a legal residence after years of unsuccessful attempts elsewhere, using Turkish documents and bank files to remove part of his frozen Bittrex bankruptcy funds based in the United States.
But even if Turkey provided him with the crucial documentation which finally released his assets, his ambitious effort to convince a court of Delaware that he owed $ 88 million in damages collapsed, leaving him only a fraction of the fortune which he claimed to have lost.
Azim Ghaders Journey started in June 2017, when he opened his Bittrex account while living in Iran and quickly deposited more than $ 1.3 million Bitcoin and other digital tokens. In October of the same year, Bittrex, faced with a summons from the American office of Treasurys of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), frozen all the accounts linked to Iran.
To ghader, the frost triggered years of maneuver to convince the exchange that he no longer lived in a sanctioned jurisdiction.
One of his first major movements was to obtain a second nationality. In 2018, he obtained a Dominican passport through the controversial islands Citizenship by Investment Program, paying around $ 100,000. Although he had never resided in Dominique, he hoped that the passport would convince Bittrex that he was no longer an Iranian resident.
The exchange refused to accept it as proof of residence, and the American court later considered this attempt as proof that Ghader was a sophisticated operator during the shortcomings of compliance of the sanctions.
The United States court has rejected an action for damages of $ 88 million by Iranian investor Azim Ghader, who had used Turkish documents to access his Bitcoin account frozen in the United States:
It was Turkey, not Dominique, which finally broke the dead end. In 2021, Ghader began to present the Turkish documentation in Bittrex, including a letter of tax identification, but at the beginning, that was not enough. By 2023, however, he compiled a full portfolio: an official Turkish residence certificate, a rental contract, public service bills and Turkish bank account statements. This time, Bittrex recognized the documents as sufficient evidence of residence outside Iran. The company allowed him to withdraw most of his funds, around $ 273,000, shortly before losing the bankruptcy.
The court decision shows that Turkey was the only jurisdiction which provided to Ghader a lasting solution. His Dominican passport failed, as was his attempts with the addresses of Dubai and Luxembourg. It was the Ankaras residence system and the banking channels that finally gave it access to its assets. This result reflects a broader trend: Turkey has become significant sanctions in the gray area, offering a residence, banking services, cryptographic channels and even citizenship to individuals cut off from Western systems.
Turkey manages one of the largest investment and citizenship residence programs. Since 2017, foreigners have been able to acquire Turkish citizenship by buying real estate, investing in companies or by depositing funds in Turkish banks. At its peak, citizenship could be obtained for as little as $ 250,000 in purchases of properties, although the threshold has since been $ 400,000.
The Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made sure that no criminal or administrative investigation has been launched on the origins of the funds provided in Turkey while offering tax exemptions and incentives for large sums of money whose origin has never been questioned.
Thousands of Iranians, Russians and nationals of the Middle East used these programs to ensure Turkish passports or residence permits, often while their countries of origin are faced with American or European sanctions. The Turkish government data show that Iranians systematically rank among the best buyers of foreign goods in Istanbul, Antalya and Ankara, cities where real estate requests are systematically processed.
The Country Crypto market adds another layer. Turkey is among the first five in the world in the volume of cryptographic trading, powered by high inflation and a low LIRA. At the same time, it was a weak point of compliance for global regulators. The spectacular collapse of the Thodex exchange in 2021, of which the founder fled with around $ 2 billion, underlined the risks. Binance has chosen Istanbul as a key center, but continues to face questions about its reasonable diligence in monitoring flows related to the sanction.
For actors like ghader, large turkeys and flexible residence channels in Dolarie make it only positioned both as a safe refuge and a gateway in the financial system.
Western governments have long reported the role of turkeys in escape sanctions. The reports of the US Treasury have identified Turkish companies and intermediaries as central actors of gold networks on Irans, regimes of combating Russian sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine, and more recently in cryptocurrency transactions which even financed terrorist organizations such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
In 2021, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) put Turkey on its gray list for gaps in the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism, highlighting systemic vulnerabilities. Although Turkey was withdrawn from the list in 2024, the FATF published a series of warnings that Ankara still had an important job to do to clean its financial system.
In this context, the use of Ghaders from Turkey has hardly been an accessory. For years, his attempts with Dominique, Dubai and Luxembourg have failed because they lacked credible evidence of physical residence. Only the turkey system provided documents recognized by Bittrex and presented in the American court documents sufficiently detailed to pass the compliance checks.
He argued that Bittrexs Freeze had cost him the opportunity to capitalize on the Bullines of 2017 and 2021 and that the negligence of the company and the alleged fraud deprived him of transformative wealth. The court categorically rejected these theories, indicating the conditions of use that govern each Bittrex customer account. These terms have given the exchange a large discretionary power to suspend the accounts for reasons of compliance and explicitly prohibited requests for consecutive damages, lost profits or punitive rewards. The judge stressed that a customer cannot claim damages for hypothetical investment gains prohibited by the very agreement that he accepted when he opened his account.
His statement of emotional distress have been rejected as not supported by evidence. The court stressed that Ghader had actively pursued commercial companies during this period and was not the victim of sudden or unexpected damage.
The Delaware judge noted that the dials of the turkey residence were decisive in allowing Ghader to access his funds but rejected his argument that they should also give him the right to the underlying speculative benefits at his request for damages of $ 88 million. His complaints were limited to assets still linked to his account (around $ 4,000 on the left after his withdrawals in Türkiye).
The decision leaves a little more than a symbolic victory. He managed to take advantage of Turkey to extract his original funds, but failed to convince us the judges to rewrite the consequences of the compliance of sanctions or volatility in the cryptography market.
The decision therefore closes a chapter in the collapse of Bittrex, but it also illustrates how Turkey occupies a unique space in world sanctions and the cryptographic ecosystem. It is both a member of NATO aligned with the West and a financial center where sanctioned nationals can buy goods, open bank accounts, a secure residence and an exchange of digital assets.
To ghader, Turkey has provided the only real road escape from the sanctions freezing that has trapped its funds since 2017, serving as a central knot in its efforts to restore financial legitimacy after being cut elsewhere. The Ghader case is only an example of a recurring scheme in Türkiye, where individuals and sanctioned entities often seek to circumvent Western restrictions.
