CBEX: Why Investors Won’t Get Their Money Back in Dollars – EFCC Chair

The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has said the anti-graft agency had recovered some money from crypto bridge exchange (CBEX), a failed digital investment and trading platform.

Olukoyede stated this during an interview on a national television programme, adding that, the commission had made some arrests in connection with the CBEX fraud.

The EFCC chairman said the commission had made significant progress in its investigation.

“We have gone far with CBEX. We have been able to recover a reasonable amount of money. We have gone far. We have made a reasonable arrest.

“We are not going to give out much because we don’t want the process to be disrupted. We are still after quite a number of people we have declared wanted,” he said.

Olukoyede explained that investors may not get their money back in dollars because of the difficult process in converting the money, which was traded in cryptocurrency.

“Even though in the crypto wallet, the same way the money was taken from them. There is no way you will get them in dollars. There is no way you get the dollars in cash without necessarily going through the same process,” he said.

The EFCC chairman stressed that the investigation had been challenging because the fraudsters used “non-custodial wallets,” which means there was no identity attached to the accounts, making it harder to trace the criminals.

“We are still investigating a lot of wallets and the wallets they created are called non-custodian wallets. In other words, no KYC. So, you can’t trace it to anybody,” Olukoyede said.

“So, from the noncustodial wallet, they moved it to some wallets in Europe, Eastern Europe, particularly Cambodia, and from there, they dispersed the money. We have been able to block some of these wallets where money has not been dispersed.

“That is to the extent that we have gone. I even learnt that there are still some of these perpetrators, and Nigerians are still falling victim. I believe people should learn from this.”