FWIW, you would see reports of this kind of thing long before the recent violence. People would mention "persian rug" and get their accounts locked or transactions reversed. Super lazy embargo enforcement.
In a way I can understand that; if you just want to do your job and some politician decides now that "iranians = bad" and makes you responsible for restricting your transactions with them, you wouldn't be very motivated either.
They probably just considered the costs and concluded that it'd be cheaper in the short term to block a few unrelated transactions than to implement a huge system to accurately filter out only the right transactions.
This is no defense, but we already knew that big companies like paypal don't care to be "the good guys"
Well, even simpler than that: the penalties for failing to block an actually-bad transaction are massive, potentially denominated in millions of dollars. The financial consequences of blocking a legitimate transaction are comparatively minor.
