Tigran Gambaryan, a compliance officer for Binance Holdings Ltd, giant cryptocurrency exchange, has alleged that the company was given 48 hours to make a payment of roughly $150 million in crypto to make its problems in Nigeria go away.

Richard Teng,, CEO, Binance Holdings Ltd

Also Richard Teng, chief executive officer of the company, in a recent blog post, confirmed that alleged extortion attempt the company faced in Nigeria.

Teng highlighted the demand for a significant payment to alleviate issues in the country amidst its crackdown on crypto and the devaluation of the naira.

“We were asked for a large payment in Nigeria to make problems there ‘go away’,” Teng stated, underscoring the challenges encountered by the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

He also reiterated Binance’s plea for the release of an employee detained in Nigeria.

But Gambaryan, a compliance officer for Binance said that on a trip to Nigeria in January,,he  received an unsettling message:

The company had 48 hours to make a payment of roughly $150 million in crypto.

Mr. Gambaryan, a former U.S. law enforcement agent, understood the message as a request for a bribe from someone in the Nigerian government, according to five people familiar with the matter and messages reviewed by The New York Times.

He and a group of his Binance colleagues had just met with Nigerian legislators, who accused the company of tax violations and threatened to arrest its employees.

The Binance officials fled Nigeria in a panic. Later that month, Mr. Gambaryan wrote a three-page report describing the payment request and gave it to Binance’s lawyers, two people familiar with the report said.

He also alerted contacts in the Nigerian government, the people said, and recounted the incident to them.

The episode was the backdrop for a second trip to Nigeria that Mr. Gambaryan took in February.

On his return, he and a colleague, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were arrested by the Nigerian authorities, setting off a crisis at Binance.

Mr. Gambaryan has been held in Kuje prison in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, for the last four weeks, after he was transferred there from a government compound on April 8.

His case is the latest legal headache for Binance, which agreed to a $4.3 billion fine last year to settle charges by the U.S. government that it allowed criminal activity to flourish on its platform. In April, the company’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, was sentenced to four months in prison for his role in those violations.

The Nigerian authorities have charged both Binance and Mr. Gambaryan with tax evasion and money laundering. Binance has denied that Mr. Gambaryan had any “decision-making power” in the company.

“The message from the Nigerian government is clear,” Binance’s chief executive, Richard Teng, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “We must detain an innocent, mid-level employee and a former U.S. federal agent, and place him in a dangerous prison in order to control Binance.”

Zakari Mijinyawa, a spokesman for Nigeria’s national security adviser, said in a text that the Nigerian government would make its case “on the strength of the facts and evidence, in accordance with due process.”

“We are confident that Nigeria has a good case,” Mr. Mijinyawa said. “Binance equally will have every opportunity under the rule of law to make its case and see justice delivered.”

In the blog post, Mr. Teng laid out the history of Binance’s engagement with Nigeria, which has become a hot spot for the crypto industry. It has the second-highest rate of crypto adoption in the world behind India, according to Chainalysis, a data firm.

In 2023, Nigerian financial regulators issued a statement directing Binance to stop soliciting investors in Nigeria. Binance halted its advertising in the country and offered to meet with government officials, Mr. Teng said.

But tensions continued to escalate. Over recent months, Nigerian officials have argued that trading on Binance contributed to the collapse of the country’s currency, the naira. And in December, a committee of the Nigerian House of Representatives asked that Binance representatives appear for a hearing.

On Jan. 8, Mr. Gambaryan and a group of Binance employees met with those lawmakers. Soon the meeting turned contentious:

The lawmakers read aloud a list of accusations against Binance, including tax violations.

They also threatened to pursue an arrest warrant for Mr. Teng, the blog post said.

As the Binance employees left the meeting, Mr. Teng wrote, they were approached by “unknown persons” who suggested that they make a payment to settle the allegations. Later, a local lawyer representing Binance spoke with someone purporting to be an agent of the House committee, Mr. Teng wrote.

The purported agent demanded “a significant payment in cryptocurrency to be paid in secret within 48 hours to make these issues go away,” Mr. Teng wrote. The amount was roughly $150 million, four people familiar with the matter said.

“Our team grew increasingly concerned about their safety in Nigeria and immediately departed,” Mr. Teng wrote in his post. “We, of course, declined the payment demand via our counsel, not viewing it to be a legitimate settlement offer.”

After he left Nigeria in January, Mr. Gambaryan discussed the incident with colleagues and circulated his report describing the payment request, two people familiar with the matter said.

Later that month, Mr. Gambaryan began setting up meetings with Nigerian security and financial crimes enforcement officials. At the time, he noted that senior leaders at the financial crimes office were eager to discuss what had happened during the Jan. 8 meeting, a person familiar with the conversations said.

In a text message last month, Dele Oyewale, a spokesman for Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, declined to comment on the payment solicitation.

He did not respond to a request for comment on Monday by New York Times.

In his post on Tuesday, Mr. Teng wrote that Binance had received assurances that Mr. Gambaryan would be safe if he returned to Nigeria.

A company adviser with deep local connections recommended that Binance officials meet with the Nigerian national security adviser’s office, Mr. Teng wrote.

Mr. Gambaryan and Mr. Anjarwalla arrived for that meeting on Feb. 26.

After a couple of hours of discussion, Mr. Teng wrote, a Nigerian financial crimes official took Mr. Gambaryan aside and told him that “everything was progressing well.”

Then different Nigerian officials entered the room, demanding that Binance provide granular information about its users in Nigeria — a request the company was unwilling to meet.

Mr. Gambaryan’s and Mr. Anjarwalla’s passports were confiscated, and the two men were held for three weeks in a secure compound.

On March 22, their lawyers received word that criminal charges were coming.

Mr. Anjarwalla escaped the next day. He left Nigeria and has not spoken publicly since.

Mr. Gambaryan was alone in the compound. Shortly after he arrived, financial crimes officials in Nigeria had sent a note to the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, according to a copy of the message viewed by The Times.

“It is important to emphasize that Mr. Tigran is currently having a discussion with our team and the intent of his stay is purely for the purpose of constructive dialogue,” the letter said. “We assure you that the individual is participating willingly.”

Mr. Gambaryan was soon transferred to Kuje, a notorious facility where the Islamic State staged a prison break in 2022.

A trial was scheduled to begin last Thursday, but the court postponed it until May 17.

A bank customer in Nigeria pays as much as five different charges electronic transactions on one account and Netizens are not happy about it.

Only on Monday, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), added another 0.5 per cent cybersecurity levy to be charged on select bank transactions.

However, the apex bank exempted loan disbursements and repayments, salary payments, intra-account transfers within the same bank or between different banks for the same customer, and intra-bank transfers between customers of the same bank from the levy.

Also exempted from the levy were inter-branch transfers within a bank, cheque clearing and settlements, ⁠Letters of Credits, ⁠and Banks’ recapitalisation-related funding only bulk funds movement from collection accounts, savings, and deposits, including transactions involving long-term investments, among others.

But below is the list of charges Nigerians have to pay whenever they make electronic transfers.

1. Cybersecurity levy

N5 is charged on the transaction of N1,000

N50 is charged on the transaction of N10,000

N500 is charged on the transaction of N100,000

N5,000 is charged on the transaction of N1,000,000

N50,000 is charged on the transaction of N10,000,000

2. Transfer fee

N10 is being charged on the transaction below N5,000

N25 is being charged on the transaction between 5,001 and N50,000

N50 is being charged on transactions above N50,000

3. Stamp duties

N50 is being charged on transactions between N10,000 and N10,000,000

4. Short Messaging Service (SMS)

N4 is being charged on each electronic transfer notification

(Customers who use e-mail-only notification are not charged for this service)

5. Value Added Tax (VAT)

N0.75 is being charged on the N10 transfer fee

N1.875 is being charged on the N25 transfer fee

N3.75 is being charged on the N50 transfer fee.

By Suleiman Bala Bakori

Boxes have a multitude of uses, and the word “box”, lends itself to diverse contexts.

For “Ajala Travelers,” the box is a necessity for keeping goods for their endless journeys. In literature, idiomatically, it can be said that “one has been boxed into a corner;” another might say to deal with a conundrum: “think outside the box;” then there is the “Pandora’s box” that no one wants opened.

To “box one’s ear’s” refers to a hit on the head, especially around one’s ears. For those who celebrate Christmas, “Boxing Day,” which is the 26th of December, the second day of Christmastide is not to be joked with: A day to unbox gifts. So much for the box.

Another type of boxes exists in the telecommunications world: The SIM Box. Have you ever received an international call but saw a local phone number ring in?

That is SIM Boxing in action. Let me explain.

SIM boxing happens when a person uses a special equipment, what is called a SIM Box containing tens to hundreds of SIM Cards—from 32, to 96, to 512 and more SIMs —to terminate international calls by bringing in the international call into the SIM Box using internet connections and regenerating the calls to the called party from one of the hundred SIMs in the box.

This way, the called party will see the local number of the SIM from the SIM Box, and not the original international number calling.

With SIM Boxes, the syndicate charges international call carriers lower rates than what regular Nigerian telecommunications operators would charge, as they do not have to pay the full cost of maintaining and operating a phone network.

Basically, they are bypassing the normal route for international phone call termination to terminate international calls cheaply and making windfall profits off it.

Take for instance, a telecommunications operator in Nigeria would ordinarily charge international carriers 10cents per minute for terminating an international call in Nigeria. However, by routing the call through a SIM Boxing syndicate, the international telecommunications carrier only pays a fraction of the charge to the syndicate, say 5cents per minute and does not have to pay the full 10cents per minute charge.

The SIM Boxer will terminate this call to the called subscriber at a rate of, say N15 per minute using one of the SIM cards in their SIM Box.

The SIM Boxer thus makes a killing from the differential between the rate charged to the international carrier and the rate paid to telecommunications operators whose SIM they utilise in their SIM Boxes, at the expense of our national security and income of mobile network operators and quality of our service to consumers.

Asides the revenue loss that local mobile network operators suffer courtesy the activities of these syndicates, networks face congestion around areas where the illegal call routings via SIM Boxing occurs.

With the huge traffic from the boxes, callers around the area see more dropped calls, poor call quality, and slower data speeds.

The introduction of the linking of National Identity Numbers (NIN) to SIMs is one way the Federal Government has worked to tackle this criminal enterprise.

With every SIM in the country being linked to an NIN, an identity is tied to the owner of each line, and regulators now have visibility of ownership.

That is not all. There is also the “Max-4 Rule” where a subscriber is not allowed to have more than four lines per network operator linked to his NIN.

With this rule in place, coupled with the NIN-SIM Linkage, every telephone subscriber in Nigeria would not just be accurately identifiable but limited to having only four telephone lines per subscriber.

To enforce this rule, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on the 29th of March 2024 announced the deadline for Mobile Network Operators to bar all subscribers who had five lines and above, and whose NIN failed the verification test of biometrics matching.

Over the last few weeks, sources within the NCC have confirmed cases where a single NIN was linked to over 100,000 lines.

Some NINs had well over 10,000 SIMS linked to them, others over a thousand, others had hundreds.

Many have questioned the reports and asked, what would any single reasonable person be doing with these number of lines? Justifiable questions, because no sane person—who is not running a business—should own more than five SIM cards.

Given the ‘Max 4 Rule’ in place and the NIN-SIM Linkage Policy, SIM Boxers have been boxed into a corner.

The applications they use require tens to thousands of SIM Cards, and the imperative to stay anonymous.

If these policies are well and fully implemented, this is the death knell for SIM Boxing merchants.

But the regulator, NCC needs to be fast and ready for the battle ahead. SIM Boxing is a billion-dollar criminal enterprise.

They are not going to go down without a fight. It is like taking a bone being chewed from the mouth of a bulldog.

Already, the battle seems to have kicked off.

A lawyer, Barrister Olukoya Ogunbeje has recently taken the Federal Government, NCC and Mobile Network Operators to court, claiming that the barring of SIMs not linked to NINs goes against his fundamental human rights, and has cost him the loss of business opportunities.

Anyone who has Nigeria’s interest at heart ordinarily supports this policy. It then does not add up seeing a so-called activist lawyer take up such a matter that is clearly against the public interest—unless this is the Haka cry of SIM Boxers.

A most interesting observation with his case is that it is not even a class action, but individually driven. It begs the question then, who is funding Barr. Olukoya Ogungbeje?

What is his interest in fighting this policy that puts paid to the business of a criminal enterprise? Is he funded by interests in the SIM Boxing world?

Time would tell. But in the meantime, NCC must go head on without fear or intimation and clean the Augean stable of SIM ownership in Nigeria.

Suleiman Bala Bakori is a researcher, and writes from the FCT.