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The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison
As a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan pioneered modern crypto investigations. Then at Binance, he got trapped between the world’s biggest crypto exchange and a government determined to make it pay.
In that silence, the harsh reality of Gambaryan’s situation flooded back into his mind the way it had every morning for nearly a month: That he and his colleague at the cryptocurrency firm Binance, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were being held hostage in a Nigerian government-owned compound—detained without access to their own passports under military guard in a building circled by barbed-wire walls. The real cause of that disastrous sell-off was the decision by the administration of the new Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to relax restrictions on the exchange rate between the naira and the dollar, combined with the revelation that the Central Bank of Nigeria held a surprisingly small reserve of foreign currency, says Amaka Anku, an analyst and Africa head at business advisory Eurasia Group. As we step out of the car at his hotel in Arlington and Gambaryan lights a cigarette, I tell him that despite his description of himself as angrier than before his time in prison, he actually seems calmer and happier to me than in years past—that when I was covering his serial takedowns of corrupt federal agents, crypto money launderers, and child abusers, he had always struck me as angry, driven, relentless in chasing the targets of his investigations.
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