Alex Frangos

speaker

438 appearances 22 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard 1 Sep

Alex Frangos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ What’s News · U.S. Sanctions Aren’t Touching Russia’s Hottest Startup · 10 Aug 2026 podcast

The problem for Russia is that the sanctions that the West imposed on

them after invading Ukraine, basically cut them off from the international banking system.

Is that SWIFT?

Yeah, SWIFT is a messaging service that's used to facilitate those transactions.

So that was the big kahuna.

But there was all sorts of other sanctions and even banks that theoretically might be able to do this kind of transaction without violating a sanctions law said, you know what, we don't want to have anything to do with this.

There's been a real cat and mouse chase since 2022, since the sanctions were imposed, where Russia has set up different systems to try to get money in and out.

This is kind of the latest and most sophisticated version of that.

And they use different systems.

Sometimes they're using cryptocurrency.

So you're a Russian and you want to pay somebody in China, you bring some rubles in, they credit you with some cryptocurrency.

They help do the transaction so the person on the other end gets paid either in cryptocurrency or in yuan.

But either way, the transaction doesn't touch the US dollar banking system or the Euro banking system where the ECB or European officials might have purview over and could see that transaction, try to block it.

So they're using crypto in that way, but they're also using shell companies in countries near Russia, like Kyrgyzstan, where you

You would set up a company, seems like an innocuous kind of importer exporter, and you funnel transactions through that.

And in one of the cases, one of these companies was creating fake invoices using AI tools, basically saying, Oh, we're just importing this, and actually we're importing drone parts.

So the kind of thing that might catch the eye of law enforcement, you know, international monitoring in the Western banking system.

Yeah.

A seven is gotten so huge it claims it's handling a fifth of payments for Russian trade, it's like a hundred billion dollars.

And it's trying to set up subsidiaries in countries in Africa and telling other countries that may have problems accessing the international banking system because US or European officials have sanctioned them or cut them off saying, Hey, we're here, we're here to help.

Showing 61–80 of 438 · page 4 of 22