According to various local reports, officials from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have been raiding foreign exchange traders conducting business on the streets in major cities across.
The raids coming two months after the Central Bank banned street trading of FX were reported on May 7 2024 with many traders going into hiding.
“The DSS and EFCC have started to harass us again because they believe we are behind the recent fall in the Naira,” one of the traders told a local publication.
“The EFCC guys came in the morning, I was not there when they came, but many of the traders who came in the morning were arrested,” an FX trader in Port Harcourt who asked not to be named for safety reasons said.
Another Forex trader in Gbagada, Lagos, confirmed that all the FX traders in the area were in hiding.
“They arrested people in Shitta and Lagos market,” he claimed.
In February 2024, the EFCC detained currency traders in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abuja, Kano and others. Just one month later, the Central Bank revoked the operating licenses of over 4,000 Bureau De Change operators (BDCs).
The raids and subsequent arrests are among several policy actions undertaken by Nigerian authorities to bolster confidence in the country’s volatile foreign exchange (FX) markets.
The authorities also ordered crypto Binance to delist Naira crypto trading pairs from its platform and detained two of its employees over money laundering and tax evasion.
REGULATION | Crypto Exchanges to Stop StableCoin Sales in Nigeria Amid Apparent Crackdown
“There was a meeting of crypto founders on Tuesday [February 27 2024] morning, and a number of them agreed to suspend the trades on their platform,” a person at that meeting told a local… pic.twitter.com/iiYBuYrpOu
— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) February 29, 2024
Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also met with blockchain stakeholders and urged them to halt peer-to-peer (p2p) trading. At the same time, the office of the National Security Advisor (NSA) classified cryptocurrencies as a national security issue and instructed five fintech companies to cease onboarding new customers.
🇳🇬REGULATION | Local Players Expect Nigeria to Ban Peer-to-Peer Crypto Trading Soon
Already, three Nigerian fintech startups – Moniepoint, Paga, and Palmpay – will block the accounts of customers dealing in cryptocurrency and report those transactions to law enforcement.… pic.twitter.com/2pk9AjrxWJ
— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) May 6, 2024
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