Bankers Arrested For Defrauding Customers Of N150m – Crime

Three bankers have been arrested by the
police for allegedly hacking into the bank accounts of customers and
diverting a total sum of N150m.

The bankers – Oyelade
Shola-Isaac, 32, Osuolale Hammid, 40, and Akeem Adesina, 33 – were
apprehended along with eight other suspects in connection with the
fraud.

Three of the accomplices, Okpetu John, 29;
Chukwumnoso Ifeanyi, 30; and Salako Abdulsalam were said to 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.

PUNCH Metro learnt that five of the suspects, including
the kingpin, Salami, were rounded up by operatives of the Special Fraud
Unit of the Nigeria Police Force at an eatery in the Bode Thomas area of
the state.

About 32 Automated Teller Machine cards belonging to the victims were reportedly recovered from Salami’s car.

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

The
SFU spokesperson, ASP Lawal Audu, who paraded the suspects on Monday at
the unit’s office in Ikoyi, said the bankers carried out the fraud on
the accounts of customers, who did not subscribe to Internet banking.

He said, “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 SFU, however, did not disclose the banks the suspects worked for.

The gang leader, Salami, denied his involvement in the fraud, adding that one Moses had contracted him to get the ATM cards.

He
said, “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.”

Abubakar said he got some of the cards from his friends.

One
of the bankers, Shola, said, “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.”

Osuolale, another banker,
also denied the allegation, saying he had given his faulty ATM card to
an engineer in the bank to help him fix it.

One of the MTN agents, Okpetu, admitted swapping SIM cards, adding that he did not know they were being used for fraud.

However, MTN spokesman, Mr. Funsho Aina, said the agents were not employed by the network provider.

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





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