The risks of encrypted payments could include being hacked, losing private keys, or an exchange running away; what gets hurt is you and your wallet—but it could also be a tanker.

At the end of March, Iran’s parliament passed a law, officially allowing oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz to charge a Bitcoin toll, one dollar per barrel of crude oil; with a fully loaded supertanker, the charge could reach $2 million in a single payment, allowing $BTC , $USDT , or RMB.
Once the news broke, $BTC jumped 5%, breaking 72.7k. The crypto community quickly interpreted it as a milestone for Bitcoin as a “neutral settlement layer in international trade.”
On-chain data did not show that toll payments were happening at scale. The Bitcoin Policy Institute said directly that, with existing technology, it is “almost impossible” to achieve.
But scammers don’t care about these technical debates. They only need a believable narrative, and the Iranian government has already written the script for them.
In less than two weeks, a fake message impersonating Iranian authorities was sent to stranded shipowners’ inboxes. The wording closely mimicked official talking points, demanding that $BTC or $USDT be used to pay the “toll” in exchange for safe passage. In the Persian Gulf, 400 ships and 20,000 crew members were stuck there, and their anxiety was exploited precisely.
On April 18, Iran briefly reopened the strait. A tanker that had paid the “toll” thought it had bought a passage permit, but the moment it set off, it was intercepted and fired upon by Iranian Revolutionary Guard gunboats.
Even harsher: from a legal perspective, paying Iran violates OFAC sanctions; paying scammers, according to Chainalysis, may still violate sanctions as regulators look at the “payment intent.”
And the “irreversibility” of cryptocurrency—in normal commerce it’s called “trustless settlement”—in a scenario layered with war and scams becomes “losses that can’t be recovered.”
The ship that paid with fake money got shot at with real guns. Poor tanker...🛳️.