EFCC Dismisses More Than 40 Staff Over Corruption as Recoveries Top N1.23 Trillion

EFCC Dismisses Over 40 Staff for Corruption

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has dismissed more than 40 members of its personnel over alleged corruption and financial malpractice in the past two and a half years. [1] The EFCC Chairman, Ola Olukoyede, disclosed this in Abuja during a press briefing on Monday. [1] Mr Olukoyede stated that more than five of the dismissed officers were already facing prosecution, while the commission was preparing case files against others for possible prosecution. [1] “In the past two and a half years or three years of my service, I have asked them to dismiss over 40 staff on account of corruption and financial malpractice,” he said. [1] “More than five of them are being prosecuted at the moment. You can follow those cases in court; they are public knowledge.” [1] The chairman explained that the disciplinary measures were part of efforts to ensure that EFCC personnel maintained the level of integrity expected of officers responsible for investigating and prosecuting corruption cases. [1]

New Policies Strengthen Internal Accountability

The chairman explained that the disciplinary measures were part of efforts to ensure that EFCC personnel maintained the level of integrity expected of officers responsible for investigating and prosecuting corruption cases. [1] He noted that the commission had also introduced measures to strengthen accountability among its staff, including a new policy regulating the acceptance and declaration of gifts. [1] Under the policy, personnel would be required to declare gifts above a specified value, including those received from relatives abroad. [1] Mr Olukoyede stressed that the commission would define the categories and value of gifts staff could accept, noting that the policy was intended to ensure that officers could account for their sources of income and standards of living. [1] “EFCC personnel cannot effectively fight corruption while engaging in corrupt practices themselves,” he said. [1] As part of the internal reforms, the commission has also renamed its former Department of Internal Affairs as the Department of Ethics and Integrity. [1] The chairman said the change reflected the commission’s effort to place greater emphasis on ethical conduct and internal accountability. [1]

Record Recoveries and Convictions Reported

The chairman accounted for his stewardship in the last 34 months, during which the organisation recovered the sum of N1.23 trillion and $684.48 million in proceeds of crime between October 2023 and July 2026. [1] He explained that out of the recovered proceeds, N397.26 billion was recovered directly for the Federal Government. [1] The remaining N836.35 billion went to individuals, companies, government agencies and other beneficiaries. [1] The latest figures represent an increase from the October 2025 report, where the agency announced the recovery of N566 billion and $411 million in assets. [1] It showed that the EFCC received 49,673 petitions during the period and investigated 39,615. [1] Of those investigations, 14,476 ended up in court, while the commission secured 10,872 convictions. [1] That means the EFCC investigated nearly four out of every five petitions it received and secured convictions in about three-quarters of the cases it took to court. [1] The commission’s detailed recovery table put the naira figure at N1,233,612,040,411.11 and dollar recoveries at $684,478,457.32. [1] The money was recovered in 16 currencies across five continents. [1] Other recoveries included £373,905.78, €9.34 million, CFA58.73 million and 463,660 Saudi riyals. [1] Billions released to beneficiaries Of the recovered funds, N661.32 billion and $492.37 million had been released to beneficiaries through restitution and other recovery channels, the commission reported. [1] Another N71.01 billion and $18.29 million remained in recovery accounts or with exhibit keepers pending verification of their rightful owners. [1] Among the beneficiaries were the Internal Revenue Services of Edo, Kwara, Oyo and Sokoto states, which received N97.98 billion. [1] The EFCC stated that N114.9 billion in tax recoveries was attributed to state internal revenue services. [1] Federal ministries, departments and agencies received N257.2 billion and $126.4 million, while public corporate bodies received N2.49 billion. [1] Private companies received N350.4 million and individuals N1.02 billion. [1] The anti-graft agency also recorded its highest annual naira recovery in 2025, when it recovered N521.3 billion. [1] According to the commission, total naira recoveries rose by 43 per cent between 2024 and 2025, while direct recoveries for the Federal Government increased by 429 per cent. [1] In the first six months of 2026, the commission recovered N201.9 billion, although it cautioned that the figure had not been annualised. [1] Dollar recoveries for the Federal Government also rose. [1] The EFCC recovered $123.7 million in the first half of 2026, compared with $66.7 million between October 2023 and the end of 2025. [1]

Offence Breakdown and Asset Forfeitures

Advance-fee fraud and cybercrime accounted for more than 62 per cent of the 46,288 offences recorded by the commission during the period. [1] Advance-fee fraud made up the largest share, with 20,726 offences, followed by cybercrime with 8,222. [1] Money laundering ranked third with 5,620 offences. [1] Bank fraud accounted for 3,328 offences, while economic governance fraud recorded 3,167 and land and property fraud 2,464. [1] Other offences included extractive industrial fraud, procurement fraud and tax fraud. [1] The EFCC recorded 9,015 offences in 2023, 20,640 in 2024 and 16,633 in 2025. [1] The commission secured interim and final forfeiture orders covering 10,053 assets during the 34-month period. [1] The assets included 8,198 electronics, 1,177 real estate properties, 370 automobiles and 251 plots of land. [1] Forfeiture orders also covered 32 schools, factories, hotels and shops, 25 oil rigs, barges and other machinery, as well as 102 tonnes of solid minerals. [1] The EFCC explained that other assets included a N450 million insurance policy, N250 million in Treasury bills and 40,844,094 shares valued at N1.05 billion and $4.4 million. [1] The EFCC reported 920 specialised cases involving money laundering, bureau de change operations, illegal mining, virtual assets and terrorist financing. [1] Of these, 680 were still active while 212 had produced convictions. [1]

US Actions Target Southeast Asia Scam Networks

In April 2026, the Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force seized 503 domains designed to impersonate legitimate trading platforms, restrained roughly $702 million in cryptocurrency linked to the fraud and for the first time dismantled a Telegram recruitment channel that had drawn more than 6,000 followers toward employment in Cambodian compounds. [2] By June, the Treasury Department and FinCEN had designated nine individuals and 26 entities connected to Cambodia’s Prince Group and moved to exclude the payment platform H-Pay from the United States financial system. [2] Subsequent actions in July added another $25 million in forfeitures, bringing the Strike Force’s cumulative recoveries past $800 million. [2] The pattern of designations and seizures has so far focused almost exclusively on international operators and a handful of Cambodian financial nodes. [2] Stolen funds typically leave the compounds as Tether on the Tron blockchain, selected for low transaction costs and for operating outside the formal SWIFT system. [2] From there, they pass through mixers and decentralized exchanges before portions reappear, cleaned, inside domestic banking systems that ask too few questions. [2] Operators migrate to new domains within days of a seizure, as they did after the December 2025 takedown of a Tai Chang site and again after the larger April 2026 sweep. [2]

Recruitment and Money Flows Through India and Indonesia

Indian government figures cited in early 2025 placed roughly 2,000 Indian nationals inside scam operations around Myawaddy, the Myanmar border town that, alongside Shwe Kokko, remains one of the industry’s principal hubs. [2] Many responded to fabricated job advertisements for computer operators or data-entry clerks circulating on Facebook groups and WhatsApp forwards, offering monthly salaries of 60,000 to 70,000 rupees. [2] India has repatriated more than 2,500 of its nationals from these compounds since 2022, with recent flights continuing into late August 2026. [2] The foreign ministry still lists dozens as unaccounted for. [2] The Central Bureau of Investigation’s recent arrests of recruiters in Haryana and elsewhere underscore that the supply chain is domestic as well as transnational. [2] Jakarta’s Ministry of Migrant Worker Protection recorded more than 12,000 Indonesians entangled in Cambodia’s scam economy in the first half of 2026 alone, more than double the entire previous year’s count. [2] The mechanics are nearly identical: fake job postings, brokers who undercut slower official channels, and workers who discover too late that the promised employment is forced cybercrime. [2] Cambodian authorities claim to have closed hundreds of sites and deported tens of thousands, yet Amnesty International’s mid-2026 assessment found that more than 70% of the compounds it tracked had been bypassed or quickly reconstituted. [2] UN experts, speaking in May and reiterated in subsequent reporting, described the situation as a humanitarian and human-rights crisis involving forced labor and forced criminality on an industrial scale. [2] India’s cybercrime losses are no longer marginal. [2] The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Center recorded losses of roughly 11,333 crore rupees, about $1.3 billion, in the first nine months of 2024, with a substantial share traced to Southeast Asian operations. [2] Full-year 2025 figures from the Ministry of Home Affairs reached approximately 22,495 crore rupees, or $2.6 billion. [2] Across all digital fraud, the Reserve Bank of India estimated national losses near $25 billion in 2025, a dramatic rise from earlier years. [2]

What to watch next: Compounds relocate faster than governments can announce their closure while American victims continue to report cryptocurrency investment fraud losses exceeding $11 billion in 2025, with the category covering most pig-butchering schemes accounting for $7.2 billion.