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| Dr. Emomotimi Agama, SEC Director-General |
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued a stark warning against the unregistered CBEX digital trading platform, which collapsed recently, leaving investors with losses exceeding N1.3 trillion.
Dr. Emomotimi Agama, SEC Director-General, confirmed the platform’s illegal status during an Arise News interview on April 16, 2025, stating it was never registered with the Commission.
He urged Nigerians to verify registration statuses before investing, stressing that unregistered platforms are “automatically illegal.”
The warning follows violent protests at CBEX’s Ibadan office, where investors vandalized premises over inaccessible funds, even as he revealed that the Commission has also not received any complaints from the victims of the CBEX fraudulent activities.
Agama said: “For us at the SEC, our primary responsibility is investor protection, and investor protection stems out of registration and regulation.
“When a scheme is not registered with the SEC, it becomes illegal; and it is important that whoever is interested in investing in such a scheme must ask the question, ‘are you registered with the SEC?’
“If that is not the case, then it is automatically stated and known that such is an illegal activity and will not be condoned even by the SEC.”
He said the SEC was unaware of CBEX’s operation, adding that “often times with schemes like this, most people will always try to keep it away from the regulator and even keep it away from their friends, except a few groups of people whom they are interested in.
“So for us, at the SEC as we speak today, at this hour, we have not received any complaints from anyone regarding CBEX.
“If we had received any formal complaint regarding CBEX, the team at the SEC would have actually swung into action trying to get who is involved.
“However, we sympathise very much with the people, the victims, because they are Nigerians, and of course, at SEC, we will commence investigation as to where these people are, and make sure we hunt them down, because the law actually has given us the power to take them down, find them, sanction them by fining, and also sending them to the prisons for 10 years, that is the provision of the law.”
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