I had to opportunity to be in conversation with someone who is currently in big trouble for allegedly being involved in a serious criminal act that he probably may not know about.
What do I mean by bad naira? Bad naira in this case is getting payment in our local currency from very questionable source, like getting paid from an account that has been involved in a serious criminal act like used to collect ransom, used by drug dealers or any other terrible offenses.
In this case the person in detention did a trade on Bybit with a vendor but this time the trade was not as fast as usual and he needed the money urgently, using that pressure he kept on demanding payment from the vendor who later paid but he did not have the patience to see that the name of the sender did not match the name that made the transfer, after a while he was invited by one of our national security agency he did not go into details to me about how he was reached but he is now facing a serious situation.
I am bringing this because lots of innocent people are suffering cases they never saw coming, Crypto-currency is not a terrain to embark on with you eyes close be critically watchful on every P2P transaction you are involved in, do not entertain pressure of any kind and make sure to see that the name of the sender matches the vendor and if it doesn't try to refund immediately or report to the appropriate authorities.
This is one of the reasons I eventually stopped doing P2P.
I used to be a merchant on Binance and then later on Bybit, and from my experience, merchants/vendors can easliy become victims themselves. You may do everything you’re supposed to do, verify the sender’s name, keep records of the trade, and still end up dealing with frozen accounts or investigations because the funds originated somewhere further up the chain.
I’ve personally had my bank account frozen more than once over transactions I had no knowledge were connected to suspicious activity. In fact, I’m still involved in a court case in Lagos related to one of those incidents. It’s not something most people think about when they decide to become a P2P merchant.
When fraudulent funds move through several accounts, the people who receive them later often end up facing the consequences while investigators work backwards through the transaction trail. The frustrating part is that most of these restrictions and lien usually take weeks or months before they are placed on said accounts and not immediately after you receive the fraudulent/ bad naira and there is never a clear indication that this money you are receiving is fraudulent, you may even receive it from vendor/person account directly but that still won’t matter. Still third party payments are more risky and honestly I haven’t been able to come up with any foolproof way of avoiding this. Whether you’re eventually cleared or not, having your account frozen and trying to resolve the issue can be stressful and time-consuming.
That’s why I always tell anyone doing P2P to treat every trade seriously. Don’t let anyone rush you, verify every detail you can, keep proper records, and if something doesn’t look right, it’s better to walk away from the trade than deal with the consequences later.