The United States will pay up to $15 million for information that cuts off the money behind Iran’s military drone builder. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program aimed the bounty, announced Thursday, at Kimia Part Sivan Company (KIPAS), the firm Washington identifies as “the drone-production arm” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force.

The program is not paying for arrests. The reward goes to tips that disrupt the IRGC’s financial mechanisms, and the poster puts faces on the ask: seven KIPAS officials, named alongside an offer of possible relocation assistance for whoever comes forward. That last detail says Washington expects the useful calls to come from inside the network.

It is the second $15 million drone bounty DroneXL has covered, and it caps a 48-hour stretch in which the US Treasury also went after the IRGC’s tanker insurance racket in the Strait of Hormuz and Mahan Air’s overseas sales agents. Washington keeps escalating because the sanctions lists have not done the job on their own.

Seven Names on the Poster, and Most Reports Only Counted Six

Rewards for Justice is seeking information on KIPAS and seven of its officials: Hasan Arambunezhad, Abolfazl Ramazanzadeh Moshkani, Mehdi Ghaffari Naghneh, Reza Nahar Dani, Abbas Sartaji, Hadi Jamshidi Zavaraki, and Ehsan Mohaghegh Dolatabadi, all of whom the program ties to Qods Force drone work. According to the reward listing, KIPAS has run unmanned aerial vehicle flight tests for the Qods Force and provided technical help for drones transferred into Iraq. The company also buys UAV components from firms outside Iran for the IRGC’s use.

Count the names, because much of the coverage got it wrong. Iran International, which reported the announcement Friday, listed six officials, and other outlets followed. The poster shows seven. The extra name, Ehsan Mohaghegh Dolatabadi, only landed on the Treasury’s sanctions list in November 2025, well over a year after the six others were designated in Treasury’s April 2024 round, which is probably why he keeps falling out of the reporting.

The offer itself predates this week. Rewards for Justice was already promoting the KIPAS reward in mid-May, when coverage counted six names. Thursday’s version carries seven, plus a new poster pushed on X that points tipsters to the program’s Tor line and dangles that relocation assistance.

Treasury Has Sanctioned KIPAS Since 2021, and the Parts Kept Moving

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) first designated KIPAS in October 2021 under Executive Order 13224, the US counterterrorism authority, for materially assisting the Qods Force, and the company has anchored one Iranian drone sanctions round after another in the nearly five years since.

The April 2024 action came five days after Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel and swept in 16 individuals and two entities tied to UAV production, including makers of the engine types that power Iran’s Shahed variants. The Shahed link in that round runs through a different firm: Treasury ties the engines in the Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 to Mado, a separate company designated the same day as KIPAS in 2021, while the sanctions record never names the models KIPAS itself builds. The November 2025 round went wider: 32 people and companies across eight jurisdictions, Germany and Ukraine among them, as DroneXL reported at the time. Buried in Treasury’s own announcement was the detail that matters most for Thursday’s bounty: KIPAS subsidiary Iranian Baspar Puya Company was still producing and repairing components for KIPAS drones in early 2025, more than three years into the parent company’s designation.

The money is the point. The reward listing says the IRGC funds its foreign operations partly through sales of military equipment, drones included, with exports to Russia and to armed groups around the region. The program names Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran-backed militias in Iraq as the proxies that cash supports.

Washington has tried the checkbook before, too. In January 2024, Rewards for Justice hung the same $15 million figure on an Iranian drone-tech middleman.

The Bounty Caps a 48-Hour Run at IRGC Money

The KIPAS reward landed in a rapid-fire 48 hours of US pressure on Iran, with Treasury striking the IRGC’s Strait of Hormuz insurance scheme on Wednesday and Mahan Air’s global sales network on Thursday, the same day Rewards for Justice pushed the drone bounty.

Wednesday’s action blocked ten companies and eight tankers tied to a scheme that forces vessels transiting Hormuz to buy IRGC-approved maritime insurance. Thursday’s Mahan Air round designated six entities and individuals in China, India, Russia, and Iran serving as sales agents for the airline, which Treasury says moves Qods Force personnel and supports Iran’s procurement and transport of UAV systems. “Helping sustain a terrorist enterprise” is how Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the airline’s service providers.

All of it ran alongside live fire. Iran fired ballistic missiles at a US base in Jordan this week and its navy stopped tankers in Hormuz, while US and Saudi jets struck Iran-aligned groups in Iraq blamed for a spate of drone attacks on American forces and Saudi oil sites.

DroneXL’s Take

A government posts a bounty when the rest of its toolkit stops producing. Nearly five years of designations built a thick file on KIPAS. OFAC listed the company in 2021 and worked outward to its executives and its supplier web in later rounds. Treasury’s own November write-up then admitted a KIPAS subsidiary was still making drone parts in early 2025. Read together, the file documents the network better than it disrupts it.

So State is now paying for what the SDN list could not surface. I read the relocation-assistance line as the tell: this poster is a recruiting pitch aimed at the accountants and freight brokers inside the network. Those are the people who know which bank accounts and front companies actually move KIPAS money, and they are the only ones a $15 million offer plausibly flips.

I have watched this movie before. Rewards for Justice hung the same figure on an Iranian drone-parts middleman in January 2024, and the pipeline it was meant to squeeze went on to feed Russia’s Geran production lines, which Ukrainian intelligence says now turn out hundreds of Shahed-derived airframes a day, as DroneXL reported in February. The middlemen stayed a shell company ahead the whole time, including the GRU officer who ran a parts pipeline out of Tokyo until the press found him in late July.

Here is the part that matters for this industry. KIPAS shops outside Iran because these airframes run on commercial parts. Teardowns keep pulling Western electronics out of the wreckage, and the jet-powered Geran-5 alone carried components from at least nine American companies. The blunt policy answer is to choke the parts themselves, and that answer always ends up taxing legitimate builders who buy the same servos and chips. Bounties and broker designations are the targeted version of export enforcement, aimed at the people rather than the parts, and that is the version this industry should be rooting for.

Whether a tip line can beat a network that survived nearly five years of designations is the open question, and there is a concrete way to score it. November’s round already reached suppliers in Germany and Ukraine. Watch whether the next OFAC action reads like it was built from insider ledgers, naming the banks and brokers outside Iran, because that is what a $15 million tip actually buys. The tempo says we will find out soon. Washington moved on IRGC money three times in 48 hours this week.

Sources: Rewards for Justice, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Iran International.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.