The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has said that terrorists are using Binance and other unsuspecting cryptocurrency platforms to fund their activities in order to wreak havoc in the country.
The EFCC chairman, Ola Olukoyede, who stated this in Abuja, explained that some of the people who received money to trade in cryptocurrencies do not know that their financiers are sponsors of terrorism.
Olukoyede spoke at a programme titled ‘Multi-stakeholders’ national dialogue on preventing terrorism financing and violent extremism’ organised by some Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). They include CISLAC/TI-Nigeria, Inter Governmental Action Group against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA) and the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS).
The EFCC chairman noted that some of the 1,146 bank accounts recently frozen by the anti-graft agency were conduits for terrorism financing.
According to him: “Some of you are aware of our activities in the area of investigating virtual currency trading and the likes of cryptocurrencies.
“They are potential platforms to fund terrorism. A lot of us don’t understand that. Some of our discoveries during investigation of some of these platforms were mind boggling.
“We thought Binance was a major one. Yes, it was. We are prosecuting them. But there are other platforms we have discovered. They used some of these young men. Some of them don’t know that the people who gave them money to trade are people who fund terrorism.”
Stating the need to adopt technology in tracking money used to fund terrorism in the country, Olukoyede narrated how he was informed by a friend in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that dollar bills across the world can be tracked with technology.
The EFCC boss added that Nigeria must get to that stage where technology can be deployed to track naira notes used for terrorism funding.