At the sprawling Sadovod market in southeast Moscow, among the 160 acres of clothing, jewelry and appliance booths, at least eight teams are spotted, working apart from the everyday hustle and bustle of the market.
Throughout a business day, these teams, known in confidential records as “departments,” receive a steady stream of customers, almost always carrying bags of various shapes and sizes.
And inside the bags are piles and piles of cash — Russian rubles. These departments, staffed by payment brokers, are a key intake point for one of the largest, and most secretive, cash-processing operations in the world.
The inside of the sprawling, 160-acre market. Image: Natalia Senatorova / Wikimedia
Welcome to the industrial cash machine that is A7, the payments giant backed by the Russian state.
Between November 2024 and July 2025, A7 processed at least 283 tons of cash rubles, worth more than $14 billion, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Russian independent media outlet Proekt has found.
For A7, ICIJ discovered, cash is king, the jet fuel for a firm now under scrutiny as a “shadow banking network” designed to evade Western sanctions at scale, according to U.S. authorities.
On Oct. 1, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned A7 as a “significant transnational criminal organization,” which “utilizes money laundering methodologies to fraudulently move vast sums of money in violation of sanctions and other laws in the jurisdictions in which it operates.”
But while Western governments and banks scramble to trace A7 money flows through the international financial system, ICIJ’s investigation reveals that the origins of the bulk of A7 transmissions are, in fact, untraceable.
According to internal A7 records seen by ICIJ, and people familiar with the matter, a huge portion of A7’s payments do not stem from conventional bank transfers by clients inside Russia, but literally from hundreds of tons of cash rubles.
Leaked internal records allowed ICIJ to identify that a handful of wholesale markets and other businesses around the Russian capital, including Sadovod, where much of the business is done in cash, made up a significant share of the cash A7 processed.
The records show that while the source of the cash is untraceable, its destination is not: Most of the cash is bound not for Western markets, but for China.
A fountain in Sadovod market in southeast Moscow. Image: Nikita Andreev / Wikimedia
A7 did not return ICIJ’s requests for comment.
In public statements, A7 has strongly rejected the U.S. allegations of wrongdoing, saying that it “employs a modern, multi-tiered compliance system” and that it was “established to ensure uninterrupted settlements for the Russian market, which has been subjected to unlawful restrictive measures.”
“All clients undergo screening to identify risks and prevent the servicing of individuals or organizations whose activities violate regulatory requirements,” it continued.
Experts say the fact that cash drives A7 raises the spectre of a money laundering operation limited only by the size of the market and A7’s capacity to physically handle the cash. As such, A7’s cash-based model presents challenges not previously understood both to the conventional banking system and to law enforcement.
“Cash is considered one of the highest risk methods of payment and store of value because it’s anonymous, it can travel across borders, and it doesn’t attach to any specific individual or company,” George Voloshin, an expert at ACAMS, a global training body for anti-financial crime, told ICIJ in an interview.
“The A7 network not only helps Russia circumvent Western sanctions and export controls,” Voloshin continued. The fact that A7 takes massive volumes of cash from Moscow’s wholesale markets suggests that the company “is also likely to facilitate cash-based money laundering by effectively legitimizing potential proceeds of crime,” he said.
Voloshin added that international banks bear an additional burden of tracing payments emanating from A7. “The main risk is that [foreign] intermediary or beneficiary banks become complicit in [a] form of criminal activity that they know nothing about, because they don’t have any visibility into what’s happening in Russia where the money originates from.”
Cash by the ton, bound for China
On its launch in late 2024, A7 touted itself as a sanctions-proof payments system, and has come under increasing scrutiny for its role as one of the Kremlin’s principal channels for laundering billions of dollars worth of payments out of Russia and into the global financial system, via a global network of shell companies, often with accounts at major international banks.
As part of its launch, A7 integrated into its business a hodgepodge of informal payment brokers at Moscow markets, including Sadovod, according to internal A7 records seen by ICIJ.
“For [A7], Sadovod is simply a big client base — a big, aggregated pile of clients,” a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity due to security concerns, told ICIJ. “And that’s exactly what they go there for: the money and the profit.”
For years, this ecosystem of market brokers converted importers’ cash into conventional bank transfers or crypto, most often bound for China. This informal system was upended by Western sanctions, which barred Russian businesses from the SWIFT system, the international messaging network that allows banks to exchange transactions. The threat of U.S. secondary sanctions — which target entities for doing business with sanctioned states or businesses — made Chinese banks more cautious when dealing with Russia.
The informal cash payment system at Moscow’s wholesale markets “depends on trusted intermediaries, established relationships and confidence that money will arrive,” Ilia Shumanov, managing partner of Russia-focused due diligence firm Tri-Trace Investigations, told ICIJ. “Its international reach can be extensive, while outsiders have limited visibility into the underlying transactions.”
Under A7’s new, supercharged system, a platoon of market brokers takes in the bags of cash brought by vendors and makes an initial count.
The brokers then stuff the rubles into numbered bags to be loaded, along with clients’ payment orders, into vans bound for an A7 processing office elsewhere in the Russian capital, according to leaked internal payment and cash management records.
A review of cash deposit and internal payment records shows that a small army of 50 or so A7 cashiers feeds the cash into a counting system where the amounts are verified; A7 enters the bag number, ruble amount and the client’s payment order into a bespoke payment management system, then trucks the cash on to Promsvyazbank, or PSB, the Russian state defense bank, a co-owner of the company. PSB puts it in a vault and credits A7 accounts. PSB acknowledged ICIJ’s request for comment, but did not provide a response.
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Source: ICIJ · 2026-10-21
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