Barely ten months after Nigeria escaped one of the world’s toughest financial watchlists, its own intelligence unit has warned that the groups behind the country’s insecurity are quietly rebuilding their money pipelines online, using crowdfunding appeals, women’s bank accounts and the SIM cards of dead people to stay ahead of the banks.
The warning is contained in the latest annual report of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, NFIU, released this week, which sets out how terrorism financing has grown more sophisticated even as formal regulation tightens. The findings were amplified on Channels Television by security analyst and lawyer Dr Bulama Bukarti, who cautioned that ordinary Nigerians at home and abroad could end up funding violence without knowing it.
According to the NFIU, the newest method is a layered crowdfunding scheme run largely from outside the country. Foreign based facilitators use social media platforms, including Telegram, Instagram and Signal, to solicit donations framed as humanitarian relief or educational support. Hundreds of sympathisers are then encouraged to give between 50 and 500 dollars each, sums the agency says are deliberately kept small to avoid triggering automated anti money laundering alerts.
The money does not move in one lump. The NFIU report explains that contributions are first pooled into a master account controlled by a senior member of the network living legally abroad. Once the pool reaches a threshold, the funds are broken into dozens of smaller transfers and routed through international money transfer operators and remittance applications to a web of money mules inside Nigeria. Students, small business owners and relatives were identified among those recruited for this role, often to obscure where the money came from and where it was going.
On arrival, the report states, the cash is either withdrawn outright or used to buy dual use goods such as motorcycles, fertilisers and satellite internet equipment, or passed on through mobile banking to logistics managers and field operatives. Investigators linked some of the coded transaction descriptions to cells associated with the Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP.
The agency flagged other evasion tactics. Terrorist financiers, it said, were opening bank accounts in the names of wives, sisters and female associates while male commanders retained secret control. Phone numbers used for mobile banking and transaction alerts were frequently unregistered to the true account holder, and in some cases the accounts and SIM cards of deceased persons were reactivated to move funds. Each of these tricks is designed to break the link between a real person and a suspicious transaction.
Bukarti, speaking on Tuesday, said the pattern showed how financiers were adapting to a stricter environment. “These people are doing all of this in order to evade Nigeria’s tightening financial regulations,” he said. He stressed that the caution was not an attack on legitimate charity. “It is not a call for us to stop supporting humanitarian or educational appeals,” he said, urging donors instead to verify who they were giving to before parting with money.
He also called for tighter integration between Bank Verification Numbers and SIM registration, arguing that the NFIU and the Nigerian Communications Commission should ensure that only properly verified lines are tied to bank accounts. Cutting the financial lifeline, he said, was central to any lasting solution. “The only way to defeat terrorism is to follow the money.”
The disclosures land at a delicate moment. On 24 October 2025, the Financial Action Task Force, FATF, the global standard setter on illicit finance, removed Nigeria from its grey list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, alongside South Africa, Mozambique and Burkina Faso. The delisting ended more than two years of enhanced scrutiny that began in February 2023, when Nigeria was flagged for weaknesses in beneficial ownership transparency, supervision of non financial businesses and the investigation of terrorism financing.
Getting off the list was not automatic. Nigeria was handed a 19 point action plan and responded with a series of reforms, including enforcement of the Money Laundering Prevention and Prohibition Act 2022 and the Terrorism Prevention and Prohibition Act 2022, a public register of company owners under the Companies and Allied Matters Act, and closer coordination between the Central Bank of Nigeria, the NFIU and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. The NFIU, now operating with greater independence under its Chief Executive, Hafsat Abubakar Bakari, was central to that effort.
The enforcement record has grown alongside the legal framework. The EFCC reported a rise of about 40 per cent in convictions for financial crimes by 2024, many connected to terrorist cells in the North East and trafficking networks elsewhere. In January 2025, President Bola Tinubu, in remarks delivered on his behalf by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, George Akume, said Nigeria had prosecuted more than 100 terrorism financiers in two years.
The persistence of the problem, despite these gains, points to a structural reality that the grey list exit did not erase. Nigeria remains bound by FATF recommendations and subject to periodic review through its regional body, GIABA, which means any backsliding on terrorism financing carries real reputational and economic risk for a country still working to rebuild investor confidence.
For now, the NFIU’s account frames the threat as one that has migrated from cash couriers and cattle sales into encrypted apps, remittance corridors and everyday bank accounts. Bukarti argued that the response must be regional as well as national, calling for a security pact between Nigeria, Niger and Benin to close emerging cross border corridors. Whether the agencies can move as quickly as the financiers now do is the open question. What the report makes clear is that the front line in the fight against terror funding increasingly runs through the phones and accounts of ordinary citizens.