Nigeria Drops Charges Against Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed Binance Exec and Former IRS Agent
After eight months, one of the US’s most prominent crypto-crime investigators may finally be coming home.
For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now he may finally be coming home.
On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against Gambaryan, a Binance executive who previously served as an IRS criminal investigator for a decade, will be dropped on medical grounds as pressure from the US government has grown to secure Gambaryan's release.
Gambaryan was detained in February and later jailed after being invited to the country by Nigerian officials to discuss a dispute between the Nigerian government and Binance over its history of money laundering and the exchange's alleged role in devaluing the Nigerian national currency. He's since been held in the country's Kuje prison, where, according to his family and his attorneys, he's suffered acutely from a herniated disc in his spine that requires immediate surgery.
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