Greed isn't always the reason.

Iran, NK, Russia, and lots of other heavily sanctioned countries just create front companies overseas to buy the goods they need.

I knew a guy worked for a company waaaay back in the day that sold a couple of supercomputers to a Western European company that did meteorological simulation.

A few months later, the feds were crawling all over them because those computers had inexplicably ended up in totally different country and were being used for nuclear weapons research.

I guess, maybe in the excitement to make a big sale, someone didn't do their due diligence as well as they should have, but this front company wasn't exactly a couple of post office boxes and an empty building somewhere, either.

It had all the relevant legal paperwork and finances to say they were legit, everything checked out, so why not sell to them?