The Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit says terrorist financiers are exploiting fake crowdfunding drives, women’s bank accounts and SIM cards linked to deceased persons to hide money trails.
The Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) has uncovered an emerging crowdfunding network being exploited to raise and channel funds for terrorist operations, alongside other schemes designed to conceal the identities of those controlling illicit funds.
The disclosures are contained in the NFIU’s 2025 Annual Report, which identified weak customer identification controls, disconnected SIM-to-BVN linkages and limited oversight of some digital financial services as emerging enablers of financial crime and terrorist financing in Nigeria.
The report comes as Nigeria marked a major milestone in October 2025, when the Financial Action Task Force removed the country from its grey list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, a designation it had carried since February 2023.
How the crowdfunding scheme works
According to the report, foreign-based facilitators run social media campaigns soliciting donations under the guise of humanitarian relief or educational support, using encrypted apps to share links to PayPal pages or conventional bank accounts.
Donors are typically encouraged to contribute relatively small sums, between $50 and $500 each, amounts deliberately kept low enough to avoid triggering automated anti-money laundering alerts.
The funds are then pooled into a master account controlled by a senior member of the network living abroad. Once the pool reaches a certain threshold, the money is split into numerous smaller payments and routed through international money transfer operators and remittance apps to a network of money mules inside Nigeria, among them students, small-business owners and relatives, before being converted to cash, used to buy dual-use items such as motorcycles and satellite internet equipment, or moved on through mobile banking to logistics managers and field operatives.
Proxy accounts and disconnected phone numbers
The NFIU also flagged the growing use of proxy bank accounts as a way of disguising who actually controls terrorist funds. It said accounts are frequently opened in the names of wives, sisters or other female associates, while male commanders or logistics managers retain effective control through ATM cards and mobile banking credentials, sometimes without the account holder’s knowledge of the transactions passing through it, a practice the agency described as a form of identity laundering that exploits cultural norms making women less likely to be suspected by authorities.
Separately, the report said facilitators use phone numbers not registered to the actual account holder for mobile banking alerts, including pre-registered SIM cards and lines registered to deceased persons, severing the link between a flagged transaction and the person truly responsible and allowing investigators to trace only an unrelated third party.
Detailed transaction narrations, coded language, and wider crime trends
The report further noted that some terrorist cells, particularly those linked to the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), maintain unusually precise, professional-sounding descriptions on transactions as part of an internal accounting system resembling a bureaucratic “shadow state,” while other facilitators deliberately use vague or coded language, sometimes switching between languages, to evade automated bank filters that flag obvious keywords.
Across its top ten designated offence categories for 2025, the NFIU said tax crimes accounted for 30 per cent of intelligence reports disseminated, followed by fraud at 15 per cent, money laundering at 21 per cent, and bribery, corruption and terrorism financing at 8 per cent each.
The agency also flagged emerging vulnerabilities in the DNFBP sector, including agricultural businesses showing suspicious foreign exchange links, shell companies layered across the construction industry to obscure ownership, and bakeries and restaurants used to accept large cash deposits later cycled into oil and gas company accounts.
It said it had already published a dedicated advisory on Ponzi and unregulated crowdfunding schemes, alongside a separate advisory on the misuse of logistics networks and suppliers in terrorism financing.
