The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), again, said it has uncovered illegal forex racketeers, who executed a $15bn illegal transaction in a single transaction.
The EFCC Chairman, Ola Olukoyede, stated this during an interactive programme with editors and bureau chiefs in Abuja on Tuesday.
Olukoyede informed that the crime and harm the racketeers had inflicted on the economy was more in magnitude than those of the Biance, a cryptocurrency trading firm which the federal government had already shut, and placed its executives on prosecution..
He said they did this using a peer-to-peer platform outside the financial regulations, adding that the commission was bracing to prosecute them.
According to him, one of the accounts traded over $15bn in the past year.
Since the EFCC has close down the websites of Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken have been inaccessible in the country, recent revelation was that some other illegal traders have gone ahead to open alternative and new trading outlets,
Some of the names which the cryptocurrency traders now use include like , Coincola , Bitget, Kucoin, as well as messaging platforms like Telegram.
Evaluating the impact of its interventionist efforts following these, the EFCC boss said it was also impacting positively on the economy, citing the recent resurgence in the value of the naira as a point.
‘’Suddenly, we discovered that there are people in the system who are even doing worse than Binance.
“They called them P2P and all of that. We noticed in the last two days ago that dollars have started appreciating.
“There was stability for 24 hours, then the naira was devalued again by N20 and N25. I don’t know whether you noticed that.
“It was due to the activities of some of these guys on P2P platforms like coolcoin. Some of you must have seen them on social media. To shock you; just yesterday (Monday), I asked them to freeze over 300 accounts. We found that one of those guys (account owners), had traded over $15bn last year.’’
With reference to this $15bn illegal transaction, he stated that they had descended on over 300 accounts in illicit forex trading that would have led to another crash in the next one week.
“ Some people just want to see this country go from bad to worse. We must find a way to work together. We got an order to freeze those accounts; Imagine what would have happened if we didn’t seize those accounts.’’
