EDITORIAL: Reining in Nigeria’s rising cybercrime academies

Under four weeks, two major cybercrime academies where youths were studiously tutored in digital-related heists were uncovered in Lagos and Abuja by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), following actionable intelligence. The operations ripped to the ribbon, the foreign dimensions of the illicit activity. This should trigger concerted efforts by all to decimate this sub-culture, which has created an image crisis for the country and its citizens abroad.

In Lagos, a total of 792 suspects were rounded up in a seven-storey building in Victoria Island on 10 December. They comprised 148 Chinese nationals, 40 Filipinos, two persons from Kazakhstan, one Pakistani and one Indonesian. The Abuja raid on 9 January at a hotel led to the arrest of 105 suspects, with Chinese citizens on the roll too.

The foreigners were alleged to be the resource persons training their Nigerian accomplices on how to initiate crypto currency investment and romance scams by using other people’s identities. The suspects’ numbers and the sophistication of their operations were astounding, while the edifice used could easily be mistaken for the corporate headquarters of a bank. Little wonder, therefore, that the EFCC described it as a landmark discovery.

All the floors of the building, the EFCC stated, were “equipped with…high-end desktop computers. On the 5th floor alone, investigators recovered 500 SIM cards of local telecoms that were bought for communications. Their Nigerian accomplices were recruited by the foreign kingpins to prospect for victims online through phishing, targeting mostly Americans, Canadians, Mexicans and several others from European countries.” In their modus operandi, these foreign scammers take over from the Nigerians once there is breakthrough in a deal.

On the Abuja raid, “the suspects, comprising 67 males and 38 females, were allegedly involved in a hotel review job scam targeting victims and hotels in Europe…,” the EFCC statement further explained. A business apartment in Gudu, an Abuja suburb, was where they were apprehended.

Both the current and past EFCC leadership have had to decry the alarming increase in cybercrimes involving youths in the country. As of November 2023, the commission’s Director, Legal and Prosecution Department, Sylvanus Tahir, revealed that 1,084 cybercrime and 395 Advanced Fee Fraud convictions were secured.

In the agency’s scorecard from 29 May 2033 to 29 May 2024 under the Tinubu administration, its chairman, Ola Olukoyede, flaunted 3,175 convictions, which included cybercriminals, and the recovery of N156.2 billion ill-gotten cash.

However, he expressed concern that “in spite of this commendable performance, the commission is deeply worried about increasing involvement of young people, including students, in cybercrime, popularly known as yahoo-yahoo. Hundreds of suspects are arrested monthly, with many of them ending up in jail.” At Effurun, Delta State, 150 cybercrime trainees were nabbed by military authorities of 3 Battalion, Nigerian Army Barracks, in September 2024 and handed over to the Police. The Delta State Police Command should explain what happened to them ultimatelty.

PREMIUM TIMES is deeply concerned about this festering social anomie, which is clearly the product of moral atrophy in a society largely adrift. “The glamorisation of wealth plays a significant role in normalising and legitimising online romance fraud…” argues Suleman Lazarus, a cybercrime expert, who is a Visiting Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics (LSE). We agree.

This bizarre social order needs to be remedied. It is a task that requires collective social consciousness of the broken moral fabrics of the society and the need for aggressive values reorientation. A political leadership that shows the light for people to follow is pivotal in this effort. Doubtlessly, too much unexplained wealth flaunted by public officials and captains of the corporate world, unfortunately, provide perverse incentives to youths to hit this highway of surreal and fraudulence to make it in life.

In our cities, outlets for the perpetration of “yahoo-yahoo” crimes are well known. Nothing is hidden anymore about these operations. Even when not easily known to some, the extravagant lifestyles of the perpetrators, the posh cars they drive, their open philandering, exhibitions and giveaways of huge amounts of cash in social gatherings and other indecorous activities, easily give them away. Their violent protest in Osogbo, against an EFCC raid of their hideouts in an estate in 2021 to arrest some suspects, compelled them to barricade roads and make bonfires, whilst firing gunshots.

The EFCC, in a statement released on Sunday, lamented how one of its operatives was fatally shot on 17 January by an Internet fraudster in an operation to arrest 37 suspects operating in a two-storey building in Awka, Anambra State.

These acts of audacity and impunity should not be condoned by any government.

Ours shouldn’t be a society in which youths revile the dignity of labour, trade or artisanal apprenticeship that could equip them with skills-set to be productive citizens, while preferring the easy way to life. Nigeria’s image has been so sullied abroad to the extent that securing visas or travel documents to some countries are either difficult or outlawed.

While we find the EFCC’s efforts so far quite laudable, they would need to intensify their crackdowns and not be weighed down by the phoenix-like manifestations of cybercrime and related vices. How the commission handles the Chinese suspects will be of utmost public interest. Nigeria would be shooting itself in the foot and deepening the criminality by allowing diplomacy to supervene, which, in turn, will let the foreigners off the hook.

Our fears are grounded in precedence and the degree at which the Tinubu government is beholden to China, through the numerous loans it has secured from the Asian country. Western and other world leaders exploit Nigeria’s weak regulations, incompetent leadership and economic vulnerabilities to demand the release of their nationals caught on the wrong side of our laws. This is a perverse, diplomatic gesture they, however, never reciprocate.

A case in point was the release of the Russians arrested in the MT African Pride vessel involved in oil theft in 2005. Again, Tigran Gambaryan, a US citizen, and the Head of Binance’s Financial Crime Compliance, was freed after eight months in detention last October, after “taking into consideration some critical international and diplomatic issues,” the EFCC lawyer, R.U Adaba, had told the court.

Incredibly, this was against the backdrop of another Binance executive, Nadeem Anjarwalla, who “fled Nigeria using a smuggled passport” while in custody in Abuja. Binance had faced charges involving the non-payment of a slew of taxes, including the VAT and company income tax, whilst aiding customers to evade taxes through its platform.

These examples contrast sharply with the 5,000 Nigerians who were convicted of crimes and are serving various jail terms in Dongguan prison in China, as of December 2024. Times without number, the US authorities, had worked in concert with Nigeria to extradite fugitives for prosecution in their domain. This is normal. Therefore, to buckle to any diplomatic pressure on the foreign criminals apprehended will inadvertently validate the licenses to their Nigerian trainees to continue to perpetuate the crimes they were arrested for.

READ ALSO: UPDATED: EFCC nabs largest cybercrime syndicate in Lagos

The foreign fraudsters’ guile of using Nigerians as cannon fodder or cover up for their vices has immensely tarnished our national image. More importantly, the exposé has settled one fact: that not all Business Compromise Emails (BEMs) or other transnational crimes that originate from here are masterminded by Nigerians. If these fraudsters are not embroiled in a scam like this, they get involved in the illegal mining of gold and other solid minerals or oil theft.

Apparently, there is an element of official corruption and incompetence in our immigration service at play here. The kind of visas granted to these suspects should be interrogated. Foreigners with work permits need to be regularly monitored to see that they are operating within the framework of the permits given to them. The breaches evident in the cases under review are enough to put the Minister of Interior and his long chain of line officers on the spot.

Youths embracing this burgeoning underworld haven of scam and its attendant unearned wealth, are advised to quit as it is ruinous. Hustle Kingdom (HK) schools, as cyber training networks are code-named, can never replace centres for skills acquisition, secondary schools or higher institutions where focused youths are trained for a better future. While there is the prevalence of economic hardship, no doubt, but this cannot be an excuse for anyone to take to crime for survival. To do so means courting self-immolation ultimately; a fact that the travails of Rammon Abbas, alias Hushpuppi, a Nigerian cybercrime kingpin, serving 20-year jail term in the US since 2022, epitomises.