Enobong Essien is a lawyer with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), dedicated to upholding law and justice as both a prosecutor and an Anti-Money Laundering Reporting Officer.
As a member of the CFE Exam Development Committee at ACFE, she plays a key role in shaping the future of fraud examination, ensuring certification standards align with evolving industry practices. Her legal expertise, combined with practical experience in fraud detection, reinforces efforts to maintain integrity within the financial sector.
Enobong Essien shared with Today Africa about her journey as a lawyer, fraud investigator and educator.
Tell us about yourself and what your work is all about
My name is Enobong Essien. I am a lawyer and I am licensed to prosecute. Currently, I am a prosecutor with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. I was called to the Nigerian Bar back in 2013.
So I have been practicing law for 10, 11 years now. But I recently went into law enforcement in 2018. About six years, I have been prosecuting economic and financial crimes. So currently my work entails the prosecution of economic and financial crimes, helping and leading investigations, or financial crimes for economic crimes.
And when I say economic and financial crimes, of course, they include illegal oil bunkering, illegal mining, cybercrime, like you know, corruption, money laundering, and obtaining by false pretence.
There are a lot of financial crimes or economic crimes when it comes to Nigerian laws now, because I understand that laws are different everywhere and some things may not be criminalized in other places. So currently that is what my work entails. That is as a prosecutor.
I also do a lot of fraud education. Apart from prosecuting, I assist in educating young minds. We go to NYSC camp to just talk to them about every kind of fraud and every offence that they might be entrapped into at that age.
Right now there is a surge of cybercrime across the country. I’m sure that you have even heard about it. It is so much and it’s like an awakening. And at some point you would want to believe that maybe the recent news concerning cybercrime offences are much because we are investigating them, we are throwing more light on them.
But I would differ because 10 years ago it wasn’t like this. We were still investigating then, but it wasn’t like this. Right now there’s a lot of cybercrime going on. And what we have investigated over time and are still doing is corruption related cases, obtaining by false pretence which is the regular kind of fraud.
We call it 419 because it is criminalized by section 419 of the Criminal Code Act. That’s what most people are familiar with, but it has also evolved over time. Right now you would see different streams of 419.
It’s now into investment forms. So we had things like MMM. I’m sure you’ve heard of MMM that came and left and there are lots of them right now. I’m currently prosecuting cases like that. Investment scams that people just say I’m doing this kind of business, put some money, if you put 10,000 Naira in the next two weeks, you get double of that. The money doubling scheme, yes.
So it is a menace. And the mind boggling thing is that people are still falling victim. I think that’s the part that always just intrigues me. No matter how much we talk about it, no matter how much it is in the news, people are still falling victims to these kinds of crimes.
So I don’t know what goes on in their minds when they see such opportunities. Maybe they feel like they can quickly cash out before it crashes. But that’s mostly what my work entails.
And I’m a member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. I’m a Certified Fraud Examiner myself. So we do a lot of fraud education. Apart from the fact that I prosecute, which gives me the background.
I do a lot of fraud education. I’m currently an adjunct lecturer with the Africa Anti-fraud Academy. So we do a lot of teaching, we teach not just young people, we teach professionals. So that’s basically like an overview of what I do. I prosecute, I also do fraud education.
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What inspired you to specialize in fraud investigation and education?
As long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to study law. My parents always said I grew up saying I wanted to be a lawyer, even though there are some of those instances I do not remember, but I grew up thinking like that.
And when it was time to write JAMB to further into higher or tertiary institutions, of course, I put in law. When I started out in the university, at that point, there was this self-doubt. Because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do because there was a lot of theory. I was reading different history, history of laws and how it evolved and in different places.
I was actually a bit worried that if this is what I would be doing for the rest of my life until we finished at the university and went to law school. So I would like to say it was law school that opened it up for me.
In law school, we did a lot of practical things. I think that is where it really just fell into place because everything I learned in the university, there was the practical aspect of it in law school.
Even at some point, we were asked to go on extensions in court, in law firms. I saw arguments firsthand. I saw the procedure of litigation, and I fell in love with it. So that is my journey into law. And then I started out in the private sector in the law firm.
Immediately after law school, I started out in the law firm. And I enjoyed every bit of it and I didn’t know I would love litigation that much. I loved the argument in court. It was really intriguing to me. So that’s what made me fall in love with it.
It wasn’t at the university stage, because then I was doubting myself if that’s what I really wanted to do. But once we got to real life, it was really interesting. And it made me realize that to be a lawyer, you have to be up to date with laws, up to date with case laws, for instance.
The Court of Appeal and Supreme Court are doling out judgments daily. And those judgments have a real setting precedence for things that happen now or in the future. So I realized I have to constantly be at my best. Let me put it that way.
It puts me on my toes and I liked that. But I didn’t know that there was a different angel to it until I joined a law enforcement agency. I realized it was way different from private practice. Now private practice, of course, you know that you are on the other side.
You are always for the client. If your client has been arrested by a government agency or police, you are on the other side. But now I’m the one prosecuting and the one putting the case forward.
That also posed a challenge to me. And so I had to go back. It was like learning law afresh. I’ll put it like that. When I started out, I’m like, okay, this is something I can do. But when I started doing it and I started seeing real life victims, I saw people lose their jobs.
There’s this particular case of a boy that served at NYSC. He served in the finance department. And so at some point he had access to the salary portal and he imputed his name, the names of his family members, names of his friends, and they were receiving salary from NYSC.
It was amazing because he used the login details of one of the staff. And why it was really sad was because when the investigation had commenced and it was found out that it was the login details of the staff that was used, this staff was dismissed.
Itt was a terrible thing because he was dismissed without any formality, of course they’re dismissing you out of fraud. And the case went on for some years and the NYSC member was finally convicted.
In the judgment, the court ordered that the staff should be reinstated. I think it was a full circle moment for me because it just went to show that apart from punishing whoever did this, there was restitution at that point.
The court asked that he should be paid the arrears of all the salary that he has lost out during the period of the trial. It was like a light bulb and I’m like okay this is something that affects real people and it is something worth pursuing.
Tell me more about your work as Anti-Money Laundry Reporting Officer
That is one of my roles, I have a lot of roles if that even makes sense. Currently in my zone I am the Anti-Money Laundry Reporting Officer. All the cases we investigate and prosecute, that have money laundering on them. I report them.
I assist in investigations and I report them. Now the reporting is because, and I don’t know if you know that we were recently placed on the green list by the FATF, the Financial Action Tax Force. It’s the global intergovernmental body that looks into member states that are not serious about prosecuting and investigating money laundering offenses.
And so we were placed on the green list in 2022. And so since then we have actively pursued and investigated money laundering cases and we have prosecuted and I think it’s over 100 money laundering cases in Uyo alone.
This statistic is just in my zone. I know that there is a lot more at the national level. And so because of that, we needed to be reporting the cases that we investigate and prosecute. And so that is why we needed to have a money laundering reporting officer, somebody that looks at the numbers and checks out for every offense.
I realized that a lot of times when we investigate fraud related offenses, we investigate it in isolation of money laundering. But the truth of the matter is that every fraud related crime is acquisitive in nature. It is because somebody is looking for profit, that is why they are engaging in fraud.
So looking for profit would naturally mean that they would look for ways to clean that money, which is money laundering. That is why I am actively pushing the fact that fraud and money laundering should be investigated together. They should be in sync and that’s what we started doing here in EFCC.
So every fraud case, every fraud related case, whether it’s illegal, oil bunkering, whether it’s cyber crime, whether it is corruption or obtaining money by false pretence, every kind of offense like that, that comes with benefits.
The person who would have benefited some amount of money and the money laundering prohibition act states that may transfer of that money. So may transferring it from one account to the other, whether it is for the purpose of cleaning or disguising the origin of the money.
They may transfer of it or may using the money to acquire, for example, landed property, is in a bid to claim the money, in a bid to disguise the origin. So nobody will know that it came from a fraud related offense. That alone criminalizes money laundering. And that’s what we use.
When we investigate cyber crime offenses, for instance, after forensic has been done on the person’s device, we see that there has been chat that maybe he presented himself as a popular American actor, let’s Jason Statham on Instagram and a lot of people were talking to him and he successfully told somebody, I’m in a fix I need this amount of money and they sent him a gift card.
The process of selling that gift card, getting the equivalent of that gift card in whether it is Naira or whatever currency and getting that money paid into your bank account, that is money laundering on its own.
So just the process of getting the gift card using whatever platform it is to sell the gift card and get the money transferred or get the money changed from that original currency whether it was dollars, euros, or pounds into Naira and into your account.
And maybe from that you successfully bought a car with it. That is the process. And so usually when we’re investigating cybercrime, you have to investigate to see how much money the person benefited.
Knowing how the money came in? Where did he get it from? Where did he sell the gift card and on what platform he used to sell it, who is the one that transferred the money to his account. That is already a money-laundering investigation, if I can explain it that way.
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EFCC seems to have different ways they handle the political class and other Nigerians, this has led to the death of your colleague in Anambra state. So what do you have to say about it?
I don’t have anything to say about that. And the reason is because the case that you have talked about is ongoing. And I have seen a lot of representation in the media about different things that went on that day. So I cannot state categorically what happened.
I cannot categorically back one person because I wasn’t there. And of course I wouldn’t be there even if I was in his zone because I’m a lawyer, I’m a prosecutor, I’m not an operating officer so I wouldn’t be there.
People have complained about the harassment they got from EFCC including celebrities
It’s not wrong for you to ask me about it. Everybody is entitled to their opinion about anything. That’s one. Two, everybody has a right. I think I have to emphasize that. So in a public space, for instance, we are taught that one person’s right stops where another person’s own starts.
These rights have been entrenched in the constitution. I would like to believe the constitution is still the grand norm. And why I’m saying this is because I personally as a person and somebody that has seen how things unfold, right from when I was in private practice up until now.
I believe that every time law enforcement of any form, whether it is the police or anybody, any law enforcement, in a bid to do their own duty, it is possible that it cannot be done fully without infringing on rights.
Now, I as a person also believe that whosoever right has been infringed upon has a right to redress. I believe that. And so I would even use an instance. When I was still in private practice, there was a time, Road Safety stopped us on the road, they were harassing us and all of that. It was a really bad scene.
And because I did not like the way I was harassed, I sued them. And eventually how the case unfolded they eventually called us to settle. So I believe that everybody that doesn’t like the fact that their rights have been infringed, you can sue the person.
It’s not set in stone. Nobody’s the only set in stone, if I would put it that way. And so I believe that for everybody, and this is why I would say this is because there’s a lot of social media trials.
It’s so much that sometimes when I read them, I’m like, this is something you can easily sue and get remedy. Why are we talking about this in the media? Is it so that we will gain public condolences or sympathy?
Because I’ve seen instances when we were talking about police violence, somebody would come online and be talking, calling them out. And I’m like, you know the names of the people. Why are you not suing them?
Because a lot of times they carry their name tags. You know their name. You’ve seen their faces. And you know the beautiful thing about fundamental right matter is that they are sweet generics. They are sped up. Let me put it that way. They are speed up and don’t take the usual course of every other matter in the court.
They are sped up, meaning you can get your judgment easily or faster. And number two, where one’s judgment is awarded against you, you can garnish the account of the person. I don’t know why a lot of people are not talking about this.
Because if you feel that you have been wronged and you feel that money can compensate them. This is for people that feel that money would be a compensation. Also there are people that feel like no amount of money can compensate them.
So if you feel that money can compensate you, why are you not doing the right thing? In my work as a prosecutor, I’m not sure I would infringe on people’s rights the way others do. But I feel like this is a topic that we don’t just need to be venting on the media. Let’s do the work.
It’s only work that would create a change. Venting on the media might not get us the desired result. And so for the case that we’re talking about, I wouldn’t comment on it because I cannot say as an authority.
I’m not an authority. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know. And the case is still evolving from what I hear. So I can only wait and let’s see how it unfolds. And then moving forward, I want to believe that I want to believe that a lot of change is going to happen.
I strongly believe that there is going to be a lot of change in everything. It is going to be like an overhaul because like you said, my colleague that died, it was a really sad day. I remember that when I heard the news, I was in pain.
He wasn’t even my cost mates, but because we’re doing the work together. And so it could have, what if it was me? You know that, I thought about that. And I’m like, no, it was really painful for me. And I sat down to say, we can’t continue this way. So I believe that there is going to be a change.
Financial crimes are often complex. So how do you go to build a strong case as a prosecutor?
I would say it depends on the strategy of the case. Now, when I say strategy, let me give an instance. There are times when the case style is given to you, you realize that it’s a bad case.
There are cases like that. I’m sure everybody knows, everybody has that kind of case. From the time the case is given to you, you can see the loopholes that the defense is going to definitely enlarge.
There are some loopholes that you think are not so noticeable, but then when once the trial begins, that’s what they emphasize on. And sometimes those loopholes can be so materialized that the case is dead on arrival.
For me, I don’t know about other people. Once I am privy to a case file and I sit down to review it and I see that probably a lot has been done and we cannot confidently prosecute the case to the conclusion or a conviction which would be favorable to us.
Usually I send a memo or I talk to the investigating section and together we come up with a solution. I say this because I don’t believe that every case that is reported must lead to a conviction. I don’t believe that because a lot of things happen and a lot of things can derail a case.
So I don’t believe that sometimes parties settle without even coming to us. So why would you think that it should get to court? It’s not every case that gets to court. Sometimes after the matter is reported the suspect comes to record his statement and then he goes back and returns the money back to the complainant.
The complainant will now say I’m no longer interested. The case has died at that point. What are you doing? And there are also instances that I have seen that the suspects are willing to restitute. They’re willing to pay the complainant back and complainants say, no, even if you pay me the money, I still want you to be prosecuted.
I’ve seen cases like that too. So at that point, you, since the complainant is still on the case and he’s not even looking to get the money, probably because it feels at that point that the loss that he has gotten is way more than the money that they are going to restitute.
And it happens, sometimes there is loss of reputation. Then they’re like, no amount of, what are you paying me back that will make do or that will cover the loss that I have gotten. Everybody’s no longer doing business.
We have lost a lot of clients because of this issue. I’ve seen that happen. And so I believe that getting a case from the point where it is reported to when it is successfully prosecuted would be dependent on a lot of factors.
Apart from factors that can override the case, like complainants or the suspect restituting the money and then complainants saying, I’m not interested. When we get to court as a prosecutor, and then of course the suspect would have a defense lawyer or defense counsel, at that point is strategy.
When I say strategy is because a lot of times apart from trying to derail the case by filing applications based on technicality, when we get to the substance of the matter, it would be how well can you present your case?
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What trend or tactics in financial corruption should individuals or organizations be aware of today?
Today there’s a lot of fraud using AI. Recently somebody shared with me a post that had basically doctored images and videos. And in the video, the person speaking was not the actual person speaking.
They used an AI feature to replace the face, if that even makes sense. And so we have pictures like that. We have videos like that in circulation. Sometimes when you see an investment platform online and you want to invest and you ask for them to video call you to be sure that the person that is speaking is actually the person that is running the investment.
They use AI features to modulate or to modify the video. And so what you’re seeing is not actually the truth. And I also know that there are people that are in the business of looking out for fraudulent images and fraudulent videos.
I think that’s what companies need to be aware of. There are companies that all they do, the software that they have, that they work with is just meant to look out and identify fraudulent pictures or videos. So that’s their own job.
And so the world has evolved to a point that if you are not careful with artificial intelligence, you can be duped or money can be obtained from you and you would have no idea. You would be thinking that you are good.
I think that what we really need to look out for now in present times is the fact that AI is taking over and we need to be sure that what we see is actually what we are going to get.
What do you have to say about celebrities or influencers that advertise these money schemes to their followers, which turns out to be a scam?
There was a recent case like that in the US. and the celebrity that advertised that platform was sued. Here in Nigeria, for instance, I’m not sure a lot of people understand what influence does, that’s one.
And I’m not sure a lot of people have read the law to the point that they see where somebody can be prosecuted by mere reason of the fact that you’re promoting a product that is false. I’ve seen it happening in a US case, the celebrity was sued and was made to pay compensation to the victims.
But here we don’t do that. So I think there are a lot of things that people do and get the way we don’t do it here. I don’t know whether it’s because we kind of revere celebrities and we don’t want to go all out, I don’t know why, I don’t have the reason.
But it is something that I feel like every celebrity should be aware of. And you know, when they get their fees for advertising, they move on not knowing that advertising those kinds of things can influence somebody to go ahead with thinking that it is legit.
I think that they owe people a duty of care, but they don’t care about it because nobody’s talking about it.
How do you think that collaboration between legal professionals and legal practitioners, investigators, and educators can help strengthen the fight against crime, especially financial crime in Nigeria?
I would use EFCC as a point of reference because there is a lot of collaboration between investigators and the prosecutors. Why I’m using them is because for instance, the Ministry of Justice that we know is on its own, is a body of people that prosecute cases and prosecute cases from the police.
The police on its own is another agency entirely. And so when they finish with cases, they have to send it to the DPP who will now assign it to a lawyer. So you see that at some point there may be miscommunication, just explaining.
But with the EFCC, we have both the investigators and the prosecutors together. And so there is a lot of collaboration ongoing. Another reason why we need to collaborate is because in the course of investigation, it is possible to investigate or to put emphasis on things that will not necessarily be needed in court.
And so this is how we put it. Collaborating between investigators and prosecutors would help you to seek out the ingredients of the offense that will be prosecuted during investigation. So if a crime like obtaining by false pretence is being investigated, the prosecutor will tell you, look out for intent.
Was there intent from the beginning? Did the person know that this presentation he’s making is false and still went ahead with it? Because there are instances where someone will say, I didn’t know, I just told the person.
Intent is important, you have to establish that there was criminal intent from the beginning, that the person knew that the information he was sharing was false and still went ahead to share it.
And the reason why he went ahead to share it was because he wanted to get it from a profit or gain. So these are like ingredients you need to establish in a court. And so if you just set out as an investigator looking for things that are irrelevant, emphasizing on things that at the end of the day will not be used in court. So I think that’s where time wasting is becoming.
And so collaborating with prosecutors would mean you are head on, you are as far as you’re bringing the case, we can see all the ingredients of the offense and we are ready to prosecute.
It would also cut the amount of cases in investigation because at the point where I see that this case is civil, there’s no point investigating it. Call the parties and tell them they should go and settle and shelve in the case file.
There are times when you see this one, you cannot prosecute it, or sometimes the case that they’re prosecuting is not known to law. There’s no offense like that, that is known to law. Meaning you cannot prosecute it. I think that that’s why there should be collaboration.
Let’s work in sync. Let’s not work on parallel lines that never meet. That way we can deliver more, not just justice at the national level or global level. We don’t need to be second guessing or trying if it will work or not. It takes out all those inconsistencies.
And education is important because if I don’t have the knowledge of what I am doing, why am I even doing it in the first place. There’s bound to be errors so there has to be a sink in what I know and what I am doing.
This is why I would say, education is not just for the investigator, but it’s also for the prosecutor, because the prosecutor is the one prosecuting the case in court. The prosecutor is like the person that everybody sees in court. He’s the person that is making the case.
So I have to know, for instance, the ingredients of cybercrime. I cannot go to court and be using the ingredients of an offense like fraud to prosecute cybercrime. And so that is why there needs to be collaboration. It’s an ongoing thing. It’s not something that ever finishes.
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What advice would you give to the younger ones who are interested in pursuing a career in fraud investigations?
I would say go for it. We don’t have enough fraud investigators. I can tell you that. We don’t have enough because if we had enough, we would not be having the amount of cases we have.
If we had enough, I dare say that agencies like EFCC will probably not exist. Because look at it now, if we had enough people educating people and telling them at every point in time, no, this business idea that you want, don’t go for it, it will not work. Look at the red flags.
We’re on social media platforms, but if you want to think about how many elders are on social media, because there is elder fraud on its own. There are people that target the elderly people that are retired. How many of them are on social media?
We don’t have enough people. It’s like saying that we are 200 million in Nigeria and 200 million is like as of the last census, because I know that we are a lot more than that. So we are 200 million and growing, and then you’re saying that there are like 5,000 fraud fighters.
Does that even cover the number? There are people that would never hear me. There are people that would never hear a hundred of us. So I feel like we’re not enough. The same way we’re saying that we don’t have enough policemen, and which is true, we don’t have enough policemen.
It’s the same thing we’re saying, we don’t have enough fraud fighters. People are not hearing it enough. Maybe they don’t understand English. In their native dialect, they’re not hearing it. I think it’s something we really need to push. We need to keep pushing for people to be aware.
Self-awareness would help a lot of people. And so definitely, I would say go for it. Yes, it can be trying, but I think every profession is like that. Being a lawyer is not easy. Being a medical doctor, for instance, in present day Nigeria, it is not for the weak. Every profession is tasking. But I believe that we need our voices to be heard. We need people to keep hearing about it.
Cybercrime, for example, is evolving to become an organized crime. When I say organized crime, I’ve had instances where we burst yahoo schools. People are learning how to do yahoo. There is a whiteboard and they’re using markers to teach people and giving all of them laptops.
It’s becoming an organized fraud. Not just schools. There are people that are sponsoring others. And now we know that there is Yahoo plus. Apart from doing yahoo, they are putting rutalism into it.
So it is something everybody needs to get on. I believe that I would tell anybody that wants to get into this field, go for it. It is absolutely rewarding. If you are one person that likes to see justice done, go for it.
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