The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ola Olukoyede, has raised the alarm that organised foreign fraud syndicates are establishing cells in Nigerian cities.

Receiving participants of the Executive Intelligence Management Course, EIMC 18 of the National Institute for Security Studies, led by the Director of Studies, Hyginus Ngele to the Commission, Olukoyede said the criminals are recruiting young Nigerians into serious organised cybercrimes, including cryptocurrency fraud.

EFCC spokesman, Dele Oyewale, disclosed this in a statement on Wednesday.

“Another dimension that is not given attention is the discovery, recently, that organized foreign fraud syndicates are establishing cells in Nigerian cities and recruiting young Nigerians into serious organized cybercrimes, including cryptocurrency fraud,” he said.

“We are beginning to see the likelihood, the propensity that a lot of these people are into illegal importation of arms into the country using cryptocurrency as means of payment. And this is an area that must interest all of us.

“In the special operations we carried out in Lagos recently, we arrested 194 foreigners in the heart of Victoria Island. One hundred and ninety-four of them, Chinese, Filipinos, Eastern Europeans, Tunisians, and the like in one building at a time. You can imagine what these guys are doing, 194 of them. Some of them don’t even have valid visas, and most of the financial activities they carried out they did through cryptocurrency.

“Another thing that we discovered is that some of the foreigners we arrested were already ex-convicts in their countries. Some of them have been convicted and escaped from their countries and found safe haven in Africa, not only Nigeria. We discovered that they are also developing cells in some other African countries by virtue of the investigation we are carrying out.”