Senate orders crackdown on bandits flaunting crime cash on TikTok

Abuja, Nigeria | By Prime Brief Media

The Senate has called on security agencies to intensify surveillance and apprehend bandits and terrorists openly displaying their activities on social media platforms, particularly TikTok, as lawmakers warned that criminal elements were increasingly using digital spaces to taunt the Nigerian state and glorify violence.

The resolution followed a motion sponsored by Senator Sunday Steve Karimi on the escalating wave of terrorist attacks, killings, and mass abductions in parts of Kogi State and across the country. Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan raised alarm that criminal networks had become emboldened, using platforms such as TikTok to circulate images and videos of illicit operations. "Two days ago on TikTok, bandits conducted a giveaway, distributing over N100 million within 30 minutes through their social media handles," she told the chamber.

She questioned the inability of security agencies to exploit such digital footprints, insisting that modern policing must adapt. "I wonder why the Cybercrime Unit and the Police Force generally cannot track these activities and apprehend them since they are on social media," she added.

Senate President Godswill Akpabio described the public display of criminal proceeds as a direct affront to state authority. "The Department of State Services should be able to track their movements and arrest them because this is a show of impunity, as if there is no law at all," he said. The Senate also urged the Federal Government and the CBN to strengthen cashless policy enforcement to disrupt ransom-based kidnapping financing.