Terror Has a Donation Link Now

Terror Has a Donation Link Now

Commentary by Destiny Tamunoala Emmanuel — The Record Editorial Desk, August 25, 2026

The NFIU's 2025 annual report reads like a fundraising memo, if the fundraiser were a war.

Here is the scheme, as the agency describes it. A foreign-based facilitator runs social media campaigns claiming humanitarian relief or educational support. Sympathisers donate $50 to $500 each, through PayPal pages or ordinary bank accounts. 

The amounts are deliberately small, kept under the thresholds that would trip automated alarms. The pool sits in a "master account" controlled by a senior member living legally abroad. When it reaches the right size, it is fractured into dozens of smaller payments and sent through money transfer operators to a network of mules in Nigeria: students, small-business owners, relatives. The money buys motorcycles, fertiliser, satellite internet equipment. The war gets its supplies.

Read it again. Nothing in that chain needed a gun, a checkpoint, or a handover in the bush. It needed a social media page, an encrypted app, and a few hundred people who believed they were donating to a school.

The NFIU calls out two details that should stay with us.

First, identity laundering. Terrorist financiers open accounts in women's names, using wives, sisters and female associates as fronts, while men hold the ATM cards, mobile-banking credentials and PINs. The women often do not know what their names are carrying. SIM cards registered to dead people sever the link between phone, account and BVN. When a transaction is flagged, investigators trace it to a stranger, or to someone who cannot be asked anything at all. The audit trail is the target. The record is being erased at the source.

Second, the bureaucracy. ISWAP cells, the report says, run internal accounting like "shadow states". Precise transaction narrations, professional-sounding entries, coded strings that dodge bank filters for words like "arms" and "jihad". A movement that keeps its books this well is not a mob. It is an organisation, and it will not be starved by a border post.

The cruelest part is who moves the money. Students. Small traders. Women whose names sit on accounts they do not control. The state's own citizens are the laundering layer, most of them unaware, some of them afraid to ask.

None of this is entirely new. Terrorists have always needed money and always found it. What is new is the rail: the same crowdfunding culture that pays a hospital bill now pays a war, and the platforms built for kindness are the battlefield. The NFIU has done its part, which is to say it has named the mechanism with unusual precision. The rest of the work sits with the banks, the transfer operators, the fintechs with tiered accounts that need almost no identification, and the SIM sellers who ask no questions.

The report is public now. The donation link is the new front. The sooner Nigeria's financial system starts treating a $50 payment like what it can be, the smaller the war's payroll gets.

 

Sources: The PUNCH, "Terrorists using dead persons' accounts, crowdfunding – NFIU" (Solomon Odeniyi, August 25, 2026), reporting the NFIU 2025 Annual Report.