Terrorist financiers are allegedly hiding their tracks by using bank accounts belonging to women and telephone numbers registered to dead people to move money without exposing the real beneficiaries, the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) has disclosed.
The revelation is contained in the Unit’s 2025 Annual Report, which exposes a web of financial tricks allegedly being deployed to keep terrorist money away from the radar of banks and investigators.
According to the NFIU, some financiers open accounts in the names of women but secretly place the accounts under the control of male commanders or logistics managers.
Wives, sisters and female associates are allegedly used as fronts, allowing the real operators to remain in the shadows.
The Unit said the tactic takes advantage of social and cultural assumptions that women may be less likely to come under suspicion.
In some cases, the account holder may not even know the extent of the transactions being conducted in her name, while another person allegedly controls the ATM card, PIN and mobile-banking credentials.
But investigators face another headache — telephone numbers that do not belong to the people whose names appear on bank accounts.
The NFIU said terrorist facilitators were using pre-registered SIM cards, telephone numbers registered to deceased persons and numbers connected to proxy account holders for mobile banking and transaction alerts.
The strategy, it said, helps break the trail connecting a bank account, SIM card and BVN.
When suspicious transactions are investigated, the telephone number may lead investigators to an unrelated individual rather than the person actually controlling the funds.
The Unit also uncovered an elaborate crowdfunding arrangement allegedly used to finance terrorist operations.
Under the scheme, foreign-based facilitators reportedly use social media to solicit donations while presenting the campaigns as humanitarian relief or educational support.
Donors are directed to PayPal pages or ordinary bank accounts, with hundreds of sympathisers allegedly making relatively small contributions ranging from $50 to $500.
The NFIU said the amounts are kept low enough to reduce the chances of triggering automated anti-money laundering alerts.
The money is then reportedly consolidated into a “master account” controlled by a senior member of the network based abroad.
From there, the funds are split into smaller transfers and routed through international money transfer operators and remittance applications to alleged money mules in Nigeria.
Students, small-business operators and relatives are among those identified as potential mules.
The money may eventually be withdrawn as cash or used to acquire items such as motorcycles, fertilisers and satellite internet equipment before being moved to logistics managers and field operatives.
The NFIU also warned that terrorist groups were becoming increasingly sophisticated in the way they describe financial transactions.
It said some cells, particularly those linked to ISWAP, use detailed transaction narrations to keep an internal record of spending.
Others, however, allegedly conceal the purpose of transfers through harmless-looking words, secret codes and alphanumeric strings.
The use of different languages is also reportedly employed to frustrate automated bank filters that search for suspicious keywords.
Meanwhile, the NFIU said financial fraud remains one of the major crimes feeding Nigeria’s wider illicit-finance landscape.
It identified growing threats from Ponzi schemes, fraudulent crowdfunding, cryptocurrency investment scams and hacking-related fraud, warning that fintech platforms with weak identification controls were increasingly being exploited.
The Unit also flagged vulnerabilities in public-sector financial management, particularly the diversion of government funds through accounts linked to finance officers and third parties.
It said procurement processes and cash transactions remained major risks because they can make financial trails harder to follow and illicit assets more difficult to trace.
