Terrorist Financing: NFIU Uncovers Dead People’s Accounts, Crowdfunding Fronts

By: Abudu Olalekan

Somewhere out there, a stranger clicks a link on Telegram. The page looks clean. Says it’s raising money for orphans, or maybe school fees for displaced kids up North. He donates $100. Feels good about it too.

That money, according to Nigeria’s Financial Intelligence Unit, may well end up buying fuel for a motorcycle in the bush.

The NFIU has flagged a growing crowdfunding pipeline being used to raise and move cash for terrorist operations — and the details are honestly unsettling. The agency also found that financiers are now opening bank accounts in women’s names, and hooking those accounts to phone numbers that belong to nobody in particular. Sometimes to people who are already dead.

These findings are buried inside the NFIU’s 2025 Annual Report, a copy of which Reportersroom obtained from a senior official.

The donation trap

Here’s how it works, based on a case study in the report.

A facilitator based abroad runs social media campaigns. Humanitarian relief. Educational support. All the right words. Then encrypted apps — Telegram, Signal — carry the links to PayPal pages or regular bank accounts that look completely legitimate.

Then comes the clever bit. Nobody’s asked for a huge sum.

“Hundreds of sympathiser donors contribute $50–$500 each, amounts small enough to avoid most automated AML alerts,” the report reads.

Small money. Lots of it. Quiet enough to slip past the software that’s supposed to catch this stuff.

Everything then flows into what the NFIU calls a “master account,” sitting with a senior member of the group who lives abroad, legally, with papers and all.

“When the pool reaches a threshold, that account becomes the hub for onward movement,” the report stated.

Then it gets chopped up

Rather than wiring one fat sum home, the money is broken into dozens of little payments and pushed through International Money Transfer Operators and remittance apps to mules in Nigeria.

And who are the mules? Students. Small business owners. Somebody’s cousin.

“Rather than sending one large transfer, the senior member fractures the funds and sends dozens of sub-threshold payments through IMTOs and remittance apps to a network of money mules in Nigeria; students, small-business owners, or relatives, avoiding reporting triggers,” the report said.

“Upon receipt, the money was either converted to cash, used to purchase dual-use items such as motorcycles, fertilisers and satellite internet equipment, or transferred through mobile banking channels to logistics managers and field operatives.”

That last stage, the NFIU calls “integration.” Plain English: the money is now inside the war chest.

Women’s names, men’s PINs

The other trick the Unit picked up on is what it describes as gender-based proxy accounts.

Accounts opened in women’s names. Controlled entirely by men.

“Terrorist financiers are opening bank accounts in women’s names while male commanders and logistics managers secretly control them,” the report said.

“They exploit cultural norms that make women less likely to be suspected by authorities, using wives, sisters, or female associates as fronts to distance illicit funds from the true operatives.

“This tactic functions as identity laundering: women’s accounts are managed by men who hold ATM cards, mobile-banking credentials, and PINs, while the women often remain unaware of the transactions and volumes.”

Read that last line again. Many of these women have no clue what’s passing through accounts bearing their own names.

SIM cards belonging to the dead

Then there’s the phone number problem.

The report says facilitators are running mobile banking and transaction alerts on numbers that have nothing to do with the account holder. Pre-registered SIMs. SIMs registered to people who have died. SIMs tied to those same female proxies.

The whole point is to snap the link between the account, the SIM and the BVN.

“They bypass the security link between SIM cards and BVNs by using pre-registered SIMs, SIMs registered to deceased people, or SIMs tied to gender-based proxies. This severs the audit trail: when a transaction is flagged, investigators trace the phone to an unrelated person, letting the real facilitator stay anonymous and continue operations,” the report stated.

So an investigator pulls the thread, and it leads to a grave. Or to a market woman who’s never heard of any of them.

They keep receipts. Seriously.

This part surprised even the analysts.

Cells linked to the Islamic State West Africa Province apparently write clear, professional-sounding transaction narrations. Not to be honest — to keep books.

“Terrorist cells, particularly those linked to ISWAP, routinely use precise, professional-sounding transaction narrations to maintain internal accounting. Operating like ‘shadow states’ with strict bureaucratic controls, they require detailed descriptions so field commanders can justify expenses to central financial controllers,” the report said.

“Although truthful narrations appear counterintuitive, they create an internal audit trail; analysts repeatedly observe high-frequency, logistics-related payments with accurate narrations sent from a single source to multiple recipients.”

Others go the opposite direction — codes, random alphanumeric strings, harmless-sounding words, even switching languages mid-transfer so bank filters don’t catch words like “Jihad,” “Arms” or “Boko.”

“This practice obscures the true purpose of transfers, preventing detection and enabling continued financing,” the NFIU noted.

Beyond terror money

The Unit’s wider risk analysis for the year paints a messy picture: financial crime, technology and cross-border movement all tangled together.

Fraud is still the big one. Ponzi schemes, fake crowdfunding, crypto investment scams, hacking-related fraud — including hijacked social media and messaging accounts.

A lot of it, the NFIU says, rides on fintech onboarding gaps. Tiered accounts that ask for almost no identification. Digital platforms that let fraudsters recruit victims and shift money at speed.

Public funds haven’t been spared either. The report points to state and local government money being diverted through accounts belonging to finance officers and third parties tied to them. Procurement remains a soft spot, and heavy cash usage keeps making audit trails and asset tracing a nightmare.

‘Follow the money’

Security expert Chidi Omeje says the country’s institutions need to sharpen up, fast.

“Every single day, these guys grow in sophistication and desperation, and we must also devise means to bring them to their knees,” he said. “The state must ultimately deal with them. They must follow the money trail to monitor these movements and effectively tackle the situation.”

He wants the Police, DSS and the financial regulators watching bank transactions to move faster than the networks they’re chasing. Intelligence-driven work, he insists, is not optional anymore.

Another analyst, Lawrence Alobi, pushed the same point but leaned on the banks.

“It behoves us now, the security agencies, to intensify their intelligence sharing and information gathering, because it is through information that we can get some of these things,” he said. “Security agencies need to work with the banks and also warn them. Any bank found to have connived or aided this act should be sanctioned.”

And on verification, he was blunt.

“The banks themselves must sit up and ensure they properly verify every individual’s identity so that there is a real, verifiable person behind every account, not just someone acting by proxy. Intelligence agencies must go the extra mile to hold banks accountable for any loopholes exploited within their system.”

Which brings it back to the basics, really. Know who owns the account. Know whose phone is attached to it. Everything else is guesswork.