Nigeria’s $59bn crypto market excluded from global scrutiny — a glaring blind spot in the war on dirty money. KEHINDE ADEGOKE reports.
Despite being the world’s third-largest crypto market, Nigeria was absent from the global coalition that dismantled Coin Laundry — the largest cryptocurrency money laundering network ever prosecuted. This is not an oversight; it’s a pattern.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists‘ landmark Coin Laundry investigation named partners across 35 countries. It exposed unlicensed crypto shops in Toronto, traced wallets linked to Iran-backed terror groups, and triggered the revocation of nearly three dozen crypto firm registrations in Canada.
Yet Nigeria was nowhere to be found in the report.
This is not a minor omission. Nigeria ranks among the three largest crypto economies, moving $59 billion in cryptocurrency value in a single year. The country’s crypto market is uniquely large and heavily informal, serving as a parallel infrastructure for millions excluded from banking.
Unlike more tightly regulated markets, Nigeria’s environment enables innovative but opaque financial activity, heightening risks of money laundering, capital flight, and unmonitored cross-border flows. According to the IMF, regulatory oversight is dangerously inadequate, making the country’s exposure distinct and acute.
Nigeria’s absence from Coin Laundry doesn’t mean there are no issues—only that no one examined Nigeria.
WHAT COIN LAUNDRY FOUND — AND WHERE IT STOPPED
The ICIJ investigation, conducted with The Toronto Star, CBC, La Presse, and partners across multiple continents, documented how cryptocurrency businesses operating outside legal frameworks have become conduits for money laundering, fraud, and terrorism financing. In Canada alone, investigators found a single street in Toronto hosting 50 crypto businesses, most of which were operating without registration. Two of those operations used wallets allegedly linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Canada’s Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre, FINTRAC, responded by revoking the registrations of 35 crypto firms — a pace of enforcement action described by experts as unprecedented.
The investigation also found that courier-style crypto-to-cash services, which exchange digital currency for physical banknotes with no identity verification, operate not just in Canada but across multiple countries. The methodology — photograph a banknote serial number, present the same note at collection, hand over crypto — is designed precisely to evade anti-money laundering controls.
Yet, despite Nigeria’s emergence as a major hub for informal crypto-to-cash exchanges, Coin Laundry did not examine these distinct channels, leaving a critical blind spot given Nigeria’s unique volume, diversity of actors, and financial flows reliant on unmonitored crypto infrastructure.
THE SCALE OF NIGERIA’S CRYPTO EXPOSURE
The IMF has been direct about the risk. In its assessment of Nigeria’s financial system, it warned that the country’s crypto market poses documented risks, including undetected capital outflows, currency speculation, money laundering, and terrorism financing. It specifically called on Nigerian authorities to identify unlicensed crypto firms and prevent platforms from serving as informal channels to bypass capital flow restrictions.
Persistent warnings have not led to systematic enforcement. Nigeria’s regulators issued frameworks, and the Central Bank oscillated between bans and cautious re-engagement. Yet, the licensing and enforcement needed to participate meaningfully in a global investigation like ICIJ’s do not exist at scale.
This absence of oversight leaves Nigeria even more exposed than Canada’s poorly regulated crypto corridor. The mix of scale, informality, and lack of systematic enforcement means Nigeria’s unique vulnerabilities—such as high-volume peer-to-peer transactions and cross-border crypto use for capital flight—present a warning that the main global problem may be left unaddressed.
THE JOURNALISM GAP
Coin Laundry succeeded because it had partners: journalists embedded in local markets who could walk into crypto shops, conduct undercover transactions, analyse blockchain data, and hold regulators to account. In Canada, The Toronto Star sent a reporter undercover to exchange $2,000 in cryptocurrency for cash without identity verification — a transaction that likely violated Canadian anti-money laundering laws. The story named the platform, published the methodology, and forced a governmental response within weeks.
No such large-scale investigation has been launched in Nigeria — despite an urgent need. Nigeria’s crypto market is vast, largely unmonitored, and entangled with documented flows of fraud proceeds, romance scam revenues, and cross-border illicit finance. All this data is on the blockchain—immutable, traceable, and publicly accessible to those able to interpret it.
What is missing is institutional investment in investigative capacity, an editorial commitment to long-form financial investigations, and cross-border partnerships that transform raw blockchain data into publishable accountability journalism. Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Act 2011 was supposed to change this. It has not. The Act’s 7-day statutory response window is routinely ignored, there is no independent information commissioner to compel compliance, and Section 12 exemptions are broad enough to swallow most requests of genuine public interest.
Letters are written. Silence follows. Journalists who escalate to the courts face dismissed cases, weak enforcement, and a judiciary lacking consistent precedent for disclosure. The 2017 Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project case against the National Assembly exemplifies how procedural delays render accountability mechanisms ineffective, even in the absence of explicit refusals. The system doesn’t need to say no—it makes yes impossible.
WHAT A NIGERIAN COIN LAUNDRY WOULD FIND
The contours of what such an investigation might uncover are already visible in existing reporting fragments. Nigeria’s crypto ecosystem includes a significant informal layer — peer-to-peer traders, crypto-to-cash bureaux, and Telegram-based exchange services that operate entirely outside any regulatory perimeter. Many of these services process transactions for customers in the diaspora, for cross-border traders evading capital controls, and, according to law enforcement sources, for proceeds of cybercrime.
The question is not whether illicit finance courses through Nigeria’s crypto ecosystem, but how much, by what pathways, to whose advantage, and under whose watch. Only a sustained, urgent, well-resourced cross-border investigation can provide the answers—and failure to act quickly deepens the risk.
THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT
Canada’s Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, responding to the ICIJ findings, vowed to pursue new measures against crypto businesses that “can be used to facilitate money laundering and fraud.” FINTRAC announced further enforcement action in the coming weeks.
Nigeria urgently needs an equivalent response, but no comparable investigation has yet been conducted.
The core issue is not proven wrongdoing, but the existence of an unchecked environment where significant abuse could occur, and yet Africa’s largest crypto economy was overlooked by global scrutiny.
Fifty businesses on a single Toronto street were enough to trigger Canada’s national enforcement response. Nigeria has entire markets at stake—every day left unexamined magnifies the threat.
