The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighters Descent Into Nigerian Prison
Original author: Andy Greenberg, Wired
Original translation: Tracy, Alvin, BitpushNews
As a U.S. federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan pioneered the modern cryptocurrency investigation. Later at Binance, he got caught between the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and a government determined to make it pay.
At 8 a.m. on March 23, 2024, Tigran Gambaryan woke up on his couch in Abuja, Nigeria, where he had been dozing since predawn prayers. The house around him, usually filled with the hum of a nearby generator, was eerily quiet. In that silence, the harsh reality of Gambaryan’s situation had come flooding back to him every morning for nearly a month: He and his colleague Nadeem Anjarwalla, who worked at the cryptocurrency company Binance, were being held hostage, without access to their own passports. They were being held under military guard in a barbed-wire compound owned by the Nigerian government.
Gambaryan rose from the couch. The 39-year-old Armenian-American was dressed in a white T-shirt, with a solid, muscular build and Orthodox tattoos covering his right arm. His normally shaved head and neatly trimmed black beard were short and scraggly from a month’s absence. Gambaryan approached the compound’s cook and asked if she could buy him some cigarettes. Then he walked into the house’s inner courtyard and began pacing restlessly, calling his lawyers and other Binance contacts and resuming his daily efforts to, as he put it, “fix this fucking thing.”
Just the day before, the two Binance employees and their cryptocurrency giant employer were informed that they were about to be charged with tax evasion. The two men appear to have been caught in the middle of a bureaucratic conflict between an unaccountable foreign government and the most controversial player in the cryptocurrency economy. Now, not only are they being held against their will with no end in sight, they are also being accused of being criminals.
Gambaryan spoke on the phone for more than two hours as the courtyard began to scorch under the rising sun. When he finally hung up and returned to the house, he still hadn’t seen any sign of Anjarwalla. Anjarwalla had gone to the local mosque to pray before dawn that morning, and the caretaker who accompanied him kept a close watch on him. When Anjarwalla returned to the house, he told Gambaryan that he was going back upstairs to sleep.
Several hours had passed since then, so Gambaryan went up to the second-floor bedroom to check on his colleague. He pushed open the door and found Anjarwalla, seemingly asleep, his feet sticking out from under the sheets. Gambaryan called to him at the door but got no response. For a moment, he worried that Anjarwalla might be having another panic attack—the young British-Kenyan Binance executive had been sleeping in Gambaryan's bed for several days and was too anxious to spend the night alone.
Gambaryan walked through the darkened room—he had heard that the government caretaker of the house was behind on electricity bills and the generators were short of diesel, so all-day blackouts were common—and placed his hand on the blanket. Strangely, the blanket sank, as if there was no actual human body beneath it.
Gambaryan pulled back the covers. He found a T-shirt underneath with a pillow stuffed inside. He looked down at the foot sticking out from under the blanket and now saw that it was actually a sock with a water bottle inside.
Gambaryan didn’t call Anjarwalla again, nor did he search the house. He already knew that his Binance colleague and cellmate had escaped. He also immediately realized that his situation was about to get worse. He didn’t yet know how much worse it would be — that he would be in a Nigerian prison, charged with money laundering, which carries a 20-year sentence, without access to medical care even as his health deteriorated to the point of near-death, all while being used as a pawn in a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency extortion scheme.
For that moment, he just sat in silence on his bed, in the dark, 6,000 miles from home, contemplating the fact that he was now completely alone.
TIGRAN GAMBARYAN Nigeria’s deepening nightmare stems at least in part from a conflict that has been going on for fifteen years. Ever since the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto revealed Bitcoin to the world in 2009, cryptocurrency has promised a kind of libertarian holy grail: a digital currency that is not controlled by any government, is not subject to inflation, and can flow across national borders with impunity as if it existed in an entirely different dimension. Today, however, the reality is that cryptocurrency has become a multi-trillion dollar industry, largely run by companies with fancy offices and highly paid executives — and that the laws and law enforcement agencies of these countries are able to exert pressure on cryptocurrency companies and their employees just as they would on any other real-world industry.
Before becoming one of the world’s most high-profile victims of the clash between disorderly fintech and global law enforcement, Gambaryan embodied that conflict in another way: as one of the world’s most effective and innovative crypto-focused law enforcement professionals. For a decade before joining Binance in 2021, Gambaryan served as a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), responsible for implementing the tax agency’s enforcement efforts. While at IRS-CI, Gambaryan pioneered the technology to track cryptocurrencies and identify suspects by parsing the Bitcoin blockchain. With this “follow the money” tactic, he destroyed one cybercrime conspiracy after another and completely overturned the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity.
Starting in 2014, it was Gambaryan who tracked Bitcoin after the FBI took down the Silk Road darknet drug market, exposing two corrupt federal agents who stole more than $1 million while investigating the market - blockchain evidence that two Binance executives were detained in Nigeria, although they were not named. A few days later, the Wall Street Journal and Wired also confirmed that it was Anjarwalla and Gambaryan who were detained.
Bello was furious about the leak, and Gambaryan recalled that Bello put the blame on him and Anjarwalla. Bello told them that he had been recommended by some crypto industry figures with ties to President Trump for a top job as the SEC’s head of crypto assets or in the FBI’s cyber division if they turned over the government’s requested data. Before considering this, he said vaguely, “I might need some time to gather my thoughts.”
I asked him how his experience in Nigeria had changed him. He responded with an odd sense of lightness: “It did make me angrier, I guess?” He seemed to be thinking about the question for the first time. “It made me want revenge on the people who did this to me.”
For Gambaryan, revenge may be more than just a fantasy. He is pursuing a human rights case against the Nigerian government that began when he was detained, hoping to investigate the Nigerian officials he believes held him hostage for the better part of a year. He said that at times he even texted the officials he believes were responsible, telling them, “You will see me again.” He said that what they did “disgraced the badge,” and that he could forgive them for what they did to him, but not for what they did to his family.
“Was it a stupid thing for me to do? Maybe,” he told me in the taxi. “I was lying on the floor with a terrible pain in my back, and I was so bored.”
As we stepped out of the car and walked to his hotel in Arlington, Gambaryan lit a cigarette and I told him that, though he said he was angrier than before prison, he seemed to me calmer and happier than he had been in years — I remembered reporting on his successive takedowns of corrupt federal agents, cryptocurrency launderers, and child abusers, and he always struck me as someone angry, driven, and relentless in his pursuit of his investigative targets.
Gambaryan responded that if he seemed more relaxed now, it was only because he was finally home—that he was grateful to see his family and friends, to walk again, to be free from conflicts between forces larger than himself that had nothing to do with him, to be able to walk out of prison alive instead of dying there.
As for the anger drive of the past, Gambaryan disagrees.
“I’m not sure it was anger,” he said. “It was justice. I wanted justice, and I still do.”
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