The CBEX Digital Investment Fraud Collapse

CBEX — operating in Nigeria from 2024 through April 2025 as a putative "AI-driven" digital-asset trading platform headquartered, ostensibly, in China — collapsed in mid-April 2025 after withdrawals were frozen and the platform's local interface shut down. Aggregated losses by Nigerian retail investors were estimated by industry analysts and the EFCC at between ₦1.0 trillion and ₦1.3 trillion across an estimated 600,000+ retail accounts. CBEX is the largest documented Ponzi-style collapse in Nigeria since the MMM episode of 2016–17, and its scale relative to disposable household incomes — coming during the post-subsidy cost-of-living crisis — gave it outsized national-economic significance. EFCC investigations into the platform's local promoters and bank counter-parties remain ongoing.