UPDATE: Fraudulent withdrawals compound Nigerians’ economic crisis, banks lose ground

In this report, TOPE OMOGBOLAGUN writes on the growing spate of missing funds from customers’ bank accounts

It seemed like a mirage when Monisola Adetubu went to bed with N53,000 in her Guarantee Trust Bank account and woke up to a N14,000 balance. She couldn’t believe her eyes. A civil servant, Adetubu, needed to pay for some goods she had bought the previous day.

Adebutu is a pseudo name for the purpose of shielding the identity of the customer who fears that public disclosure of her identity might cause trouble for her.

She still couldn’t come to terms with the fact that she would be shamelessly embarrassed before her newly found customer whose trust she had betrayed. She was expected to pay for her goods on delivery.

After three weeks of visiting the bank back and forth, the wrong debit was not reversed.

“I slept and woke up to see that over N39,000 had been deducted from my account. I was very infuriated.

“Out of anger, I called the GTB customer care numbers but none of them could be reached. I went to Twitter to tweet at the bank and got a response from one of the GTB support groups,” Adetubu recalled.

She explained that a parody account of GTB reached out to her disguising as support and sent her an online form to fill. She had innocently compounded her woes.

Adetubu said, “The moment I filled the form, before I knew it, the remaining money in my account was wiped off. Before I could complain, the number blocked me, so I couldn’t interact with them anymore. It was at that point that I realised I had been swindled by a fraudster.”

Adebutu was left to wander around. She said she had to call some of her friends to send money into another bank account to sort out some needs before going to the bank to lodge a complaint.

Adebutu said a banker told her the N39,000 was blocked in the account and there was nothing they could do about it immediately.

She narrated, “I was distraught when I got to the bank with high hopes that I would get back my money only for me to receive an email from the bank stating that the money was out of their purview and that if I came early they would have been able to do something about it.

“When the alert was eventually sent for the deduction of the N39,000, it showed me that the deduction was made in Victoria Island which is the same address on my account. It’s terribly sad that the security of one’s money in the bank is not guaranteed anymore. It is even more dangerous that people can access such important details as one’s address from your bank records.

“That is highly careless of Guaranty Trust Bank if they claim not to know anything about the disappearance of N39,000 from my account. I have since stopped using the bank.”

More tales of loss

Adebutu isn’t the only victim of such loss. Many other Nigerians have narrated unfortunate tales of how they kept money in the banks and all of a sudden found that their money went missing.

A few months ago, the internet went agog when the video of a man surfaced online creating a scene at one of the branches of Access Bank.

The trending clip captured the moment a man stripped off his clothes in a bank after he was debited with a whooping sum of N1.5m. Apparently frustrated, the man climbed over the counter and hell was let loose.

The bank workers kept pleading with him to take things easy. One of them was heard in Yoruba saying, “It hasn’t got to that.”

The irked man responded that “It’s more than that.”

The man insisted that he wouldn’t leave until he got refunded.

The unfortunate scenario continued at the Oshodi branch of Union Bank where a teacher, Mrs Chioma Nwazubike let out a shout in the banking screaming, “My money! My hard-earned money! I’m finished! Somebody help me!”

The aggrieved woman kept wailing uncontrollably, lamenting that banks were no longer safe to keep money.

The teacher said she was home resting and preparing for Monday’s work when she was alerted by the buzz of her phone. Before she could reach her phone, there was yet another alert. She quickly reached out to her phone to find out who has been sending her text messages only to meet the shock of her life; debit alerts!

“I was just receiving debit alerts of money I didn’t collect on Sunday night. The alerts came four times! I did not use my ATM, I did not visit any PoS kiosk, and I didn’t send anybody messages. I heard the sound of debit alerts on my phone four times, so I had to rush here (the bank), only for them to ask me to go and get a court affidavit before they could do anything,” Nwazubike narrated amid tears.

She went on, “I have an ATM card but I use it myself, my pin is not known by any other person. I don’t have a mobile app on my phone, I don’t use the one they call token either. I only use the Union Bank short code to do transactions. I don’t know what happened. I can’t tell how this calamity befell me.”

The rich also cry

The issue of missing funds isn’t just peculiar to people with little savings. There have been cases of millions of naira disappearing from accounts overnight.

Investigations by The PUNCH further revealed that a lot of rich people have had to go through this trauma, particularly in recent times but many of them were refunded by the bank because of their influence.

According to a source in one of the commercial banks, the very rich and influential people usually don’t come to the public to talk about it, they just reach out to the bank.

Many times, some of them don’t even know about these deductions because they deactivate alerts from their account because of the security issues and the sensitivity of the amounts in their account, the source hinted.

“Some of them do not even know because they don’t receive alerts, it’s only when they probably need their bank statements that many of them find out. Sometimes, they do not even have ATM cards.

“Some roguish account officers often get ATM cards and sometimes they even duplicate by getting extra ATM cards and withdraw money intermittently from such accounts. However, in this case, the culprits are often arrested once the customer complains. But unfortunately for the customers, many of them don’t usually find out,” the source added.

The social media microblogging site, Twitter, was set on fire a few weeks ago when a research chemist, Esther Udoh, a customer at Zenith Bank narrated how N6m disappeared from her account.

She had called on the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to come to her rescue.