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A dual U.S.-Iranian national living in one of California’s most exclusive zip codes has been arrested<\/a> for secretly supplying American technology to Iran’s nuclear and military establishments.<\/p>\n This is the latest in a growing series of federal cases exposing the Islamic Republic’s aggressive efforts to exploit U.S. systems, steal American technology, and intimidate dissidents on American soil.<\/p>\n Jamshid Ghomi, 63, of Newport Coast, California, was arrested Wednesday on federal charges of conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran. As CEO of Tehran-based tech firm Faraz Pardaz Rayaneh Co. (FPR), Ghomi spent more than a decade obtaining sophisticated American-made networking, security, and encryption equipment for Iranian customers, including the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the agency directly responsible for Iran’s centrifuge and uranium-enrichment programs, and Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics.<\/p>\n To hide what he was doing, Ghomi routed shipments through front companies in the UAE, instructed co-conspirators to scrub his name from shipping paperwork, hid U.S. equipment inside larger shipments, and referred to Iran internally as the “Motherland.” He smuggled more than 250 metric tons of networking equipment into Iran between 2014 and 2018 alone. FPR’s annual sales exceeded $10 million.<\/p>\n The money laundering was just as brazen. Ghomi moved more than $15 million from Iran into his U.S. bank accounts, falsely reporting the funds to the IRS as a foreign inheritance. During the same period, he claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit \u2014 a benefit for low-income workers \u2014 in seven different tax years, while reporting almost no income. He used the illicit proceeds to build a $35 million Newport Coast mansion<\/a> that federal prosecutors intend to seize.<\/p>\n The Ghomi case is far from an isolated incident. The DOJ has been methodically dismantling Iran’s American networks across multiple fronts.<\/p>\n In December 2023, federal prosecutors charged<\/a> Iranian national Hossein Hatefi Ardakani and a Chinese co-defendant with allegedly procuring U.S. microelectronics for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) drone program. Those were the same one-way attack UAVs later found deployed in Ukraine. The components included military-grade transistors and microwave amplifiers routed through a web of front companies.<\/p>\n