Bankers Arrested For Siphoning N150M

Three bankers of an undisclosed bank have been apprehended for supposedly hacking into the banks accounts of customers and syphoning a sum of N150m.

Arrested along with eight other suspects alleged to be connected to the fraud, Oyelade Shola-Isaac, 32, Osuolale Hammid, 40, and Akeem Adesina, 33 were apprehended by officials of the Special Fraud Unit of the Nigeria Police Force at an eatery in the Bode Thomas, Lagos State.

Three of the accomplices, Okpetu John, 29; Chukwumnoso Ifeanyi, 30; and Salako Abdulsalam have been reportedto be MTN agents, while others were identified as Ismaeel Salami, 49; Akinola Oghuan, 34; Sarumi Abubakar, 32; James Idagu, 56; and 33-year-old Sunday Okeke.

The kingpin, Salami, rounded up with the other suspects, was found in possesion of 32 Automated Teller Machine cards owned by the bank customers.

They have been said to have led security operatives to Kwara and Oyo states, where other members of the gang were arrested.

Parading the suspects on Monday, Nigeria Police Special Fraud Unit spokesperson, ASP Lawal Audu disclosed that the bankers executed the fraud on the accounts of undisclosed customers, not subscribed to Internet banking.

According to him, “The work of the network provider suspects was to assist the bankers to swap the SIM cards of the targeted bank customers so that they were unable to receive alerts of any transactions on their accounts within the period that money was stolen from their accounts.

“The suspects, after successful withdrawals of the money, transferred the money into about 40 different accounts to avoid being detected. They carried out their operations at weekends and public holidays so as to evade being detected by the bank monitoring mechanisms or the owners of the accounts.

They defrauded their victims to the tune of over N150m.”
The ring leader, Salami, has however denied any involvement in the fraud as he was only contracted to getr the ATM cards by one Moses.

“I was in an eatery at Surulere with my friends when the policemen came to arrest us and said we were fraudsters. In May this year, a friend of mine, Moses, asked me to get some ATM cards for him, but I did not demand what he wanted to use them for.

I was looking for someone that could help me get the ATM cards when I came across one Abubakar at Ibadan, Oyo State. To my surprise, he brought about 40 cards to me.”

One of the bankers, Osuolale, also refuted the accusation, explaining that he gave his damaged ATM card to an engineer in the bank to help him repair it.

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Another banker,Shola, disclosed that, “One day, my manager called me to come to the office that my car on the premises was blocking another car. When I got there, I was told someone used my password for fraud and that my two colleagues had also confessed to the crime. That was how we were transferred to the SFU last Tuesday.”

One of the MTN agents, Okpetu, admitted that he swapped sim card and that he was unaware they were being used for fraud.
MTN spokesman, Mr. Funsho Aina, has however said the agents were not employed by the company.

According to him, “Those paraded today (Monday) at the SFU are not MTN workers. Rather, they are employees of a distribution partner, who runs a connect store.”