As an IRS agent, Tigran Gambaryan was perhaps the most effective crypto investigator in history. Then last year he was charged in Nigeria with money laundering and thrown in prison.
Throughout, he was texting with me from a secret phone. This is his full, untold story. https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/
But after Binance paid a $4.3 billion settlement to the US for the crimes Gambaryan had been hired to clean up, Nigeria also accused the exchange of money laundering and devaluing its currency.
Binance sent Gambaryan and a team to Abuja to talk. Officials there demanded a $150 million bribe.
Rather than pay, the Binance team got out of the country. But Gambaryan was lured back by *other* Nigerian financial crime officials who said they wanted to investigate the bribe demand. He returned with another exec, Nadeem Anjarwalla.
Both men were detained and their passports taken.
The two men spent the next month held in a government-owned "guesthouse" behind barbed wire walls as Nigerian officials demanded billions from Binance.
Then one morning, Gambaryan found Anjarwalla's bed empty, a pillow stuffed in a T-shirt to look like his body. He had escaped.
Nigerian officials were furious. They criminally charged Gambaryan, put him in a windowless cell crawling with cockroaches, then in the notorious Kuje prison.
Over the next months, he would nearly die from malaria and pneumonia and be partially paralyzed from a spinal injury.
One promise of crypto has long been its potential to flout state control. Gambaryan's story is what happens when that promise actually comes into conflict with an unaccountable government.
Read the full, untold story of his hellish ordeal—and how he finally got free. https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/
CSmizzle
Andy Greenberg
