The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has revealed it has frozen over 300 bank accounts suspected of been involved in illegal foreign exchange (Forex) trading, which was made known on Tuesday by the Chairman of EFCC, Ola Olukoyede during a media briefing, where he stated that the Commission secured a court order to freeze the accounts. According to him, some people in Nigeria are involved in illegal forex trading worse than what Binance Holdings Limited was accused of and added that over $15 billion was moved through one of the platforms in the last year.
He said, “We observe due process in whatever we do. Do you know that the Binance case we are currently handling now has helped us to bring down the madness in the forex market?
“Suddenly, we discovered that there 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 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.
“Over 300 accounts in illicit forex trading that would have led to another crash in the next one week, if we didn’t move yesterday. Some people just want to see this country go from bad to worse. W 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.”
