OTTAWA — Ryan Wedding, the former Olympic snowboarder accused of running a billion-dollar cocaine network for the Sinaloa Cartel, used currency exchanges in the Vancouver and Toronto areas to launder billions of dollars in drug proceeds, the United States Treasury Department alleged Friday, as it sanctioned eight Canadian money services businesses accused of moving money for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said the eight businesses, six in the Toronto area and two in Vancouver, exchange Iranian rials and other currencies for cryptocurrency, and that many had transacted with sanctioned Iranian digital asset exchanges and with cryptocurrency addresses tied to the IRGC. Several of them, Treasury said, also worked with Wedding.
“Canada cannot be a safe haven for illicit financial facilitators that provide sanctions evasion services to the Iranian regime and its proxies,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. “Treasury will pursue and disrupt the Iranian regime’s financial channels anywhere in the world.”
The action, part of a Treasury campaign called Operation Economic Outcast, was coordinated with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). OFAC records show that each of the eight companies holds a money services business registration number in Canada.
The designations put on the American record illuminate a convergence The Bureau has reported for two years, between Iranian-linked financial networks in Canada and Wedding’s organization.
“Wedding has used money exchange businesses in the Vancouver and Toronto areas to launder billions of dollars in drug proceeds,” Treasury said. “He has used couriers to transport bulk cash to those firms, which convert the funds to digital assets to send abroad.”
Wedding, the department said, worked with several of the businesses designated Friday “to transfer millions of dollars’ worth of digital assets prior to being taken into U.S. custody.”
Treasury named three of the businesses in connection with Wedding.
The listings sketch a corridor.
Six of the eight companies give addresses along a stretch of Yonge Street running about 10 kilometers from North York to Richmond Hill, and several share units. Two companies list the same suite at 7181 Yonge Street in Thornhill. Among the trade names Treasury recorded are “Sarafi Amin,” “Sarafi Capital,” “Parsis Exchange” and “Salam Exchange.”
Sarafi is the Persian word for an exchange house.
Treasury said Canada is home to hundreds of money services businesses that move funds into and out of Iran, through cash-based value transfer systems and by converting cash into cryptocurrency.
“Although Canadian and international media sources have highlighted the sanctions evasion and terrorist financing-related risks that certain of these money services businesses pose, the entities designated today remain operational,” the department said. “Several of these entities have changed their business names and addresses in an attempt to evade detection and enforcement actions.”
The sanctions block any property the companies hold in the United States or under the control of Americans, and generally bar Americans from dealing with them. They also carry secondary sanctions risk, which exposes foreign banks and businesses that deal with the companies to American penalties. The designations are not criminal charges.
In October 2024, The Bureau reported that Wedding’s rise in the early 2000s was facilitated by close connections to elite Iranian money launderers in Vancouver, and that RCMP and DEA investigations had linked his networks to Iranian encrypted communications and to Venezuela’s Margarita Island, a hub for Hezbollah’s narcotics operations. The RCMP investigation known as Operation Harrington, The Bureau reported, found that Iranian-linked money launderers with ties to Mexican and Colombian trafficking were overtaking Canadian drug networks.
The Toronto end of that system surfaced at the trial of Cameron Ortis, the RCMP’s former intelligence director, who was convicted in November 2023 of leaking secrets to the targets of police investigations, among them associates of the Pakistani money launderer Altaf Khanani. Ortis’s lawyers implied that he had used intelligence from Canada’s allies to disrupt an Iranian terror financing network laundering drug money through Toronto currency shops and Canadian banks. Asked to name the hostile states abusing Canadian banks, Ortis answered, “Iran, Russia, China, several other countries.”
Treasury’s action Friday is the second time in a week that Washington has documented Wedding’s reach into the institutions of other countries. This week, The Bureau reported that Luis Benítez Alcántara, a Mexican federal judge, had been arrested in Colombia and charged in Los Angeles with accepting a $2-million cash bribe to free Andrew Clark, Wedding’s alleged second-in-command.
Wedding was arrested in Mexico City in January 2026 after nearly a year on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He is held without bond in the United States and faces two federal trials in Los Angeles, scheduled for March 31 and October 26, 2027. He has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent.
