– Ebere Wabara
AFTER this moonlight preface comes my intervention. “Adam Nuru, managing director of First City Monument Bank (FCMB), says the bank made an error of posting N573 million into the church account of Emmanuel Omale.
“The Presidential Committee on Audit of Recovered Assets (PCARA) had accused Ibrahim Magu, suspended acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), of allegedly using Omale, founder of the Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry, to launder funds abroad.
“The committee said the former acting chairman purchased a property in Dubai using Omale’s name — an allegation the pastor has denied.
“Magu is being investigated by the committee headed by Ayo Salami, former president of the appeal court, for allegedly mismanaging loot recovered by the anti-graft agency.
“Testifying before the committee on Thursday, Nuru said the bank just discovered the mistake upon invitation by the committee—four years after the money was posted.
“On January 16, 2016, we made a return to NFIU which indicated that there was a transaction of an inflow of well over N573million. (N573,228,40),” the bank MD said.
“This return was said to be in favour of Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries Account No 1486743019.
“After that report, we conducted an investigation and discovered that the lodgement which we reported to NFIU was an error.
“The error was as a result of the fact that we were using a bank application called Pinnacle-7. However, we migrated from that application to a newer version called Pinnacle-10.
“Usually, when the bank intends to migrate from one application to another, we utilize weekends to carry out the exercise. The migration involves moving all the balances of customers from the previous application to the new application. The account of the Divine Hand Ministries was moved during that migration.
“It was that balance of N573million that was wrongly posted as an inflow into Divine Hand Ministries as reported to NFIU. This error was not peculiar to Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministries alone but was also ascribed to 27 other accounts.” (Credit: The Cable)
What kind of moonlight tale is this? Has Nigerians’ gullibility degenerated into intellectual vacuity and senselessness? How can a bank mistakenly credit an account with approximately N600 million and not doing anything about the veiled transaction for four years until it was interrogated by a special presidential committee on recovery of loot? The ludicrous foregoing is confirmatory of my recent case with the bank and similar despicable circumstances as avowed by other serial victims.
Last year, I was unconventionally scammed of N450, 000 and almost lost N15million to three fraudsters who allegedly cloned the number of the former Group Managing Director of Diamond Bank Plc and the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) governorship candidate for Abia State, Dr Alex Otti, in the last polls.
On Friday, January 11, 2019, three hellish scammers—two men and a woman (Rita Eke, most likely a fictitious name just like her co-conspirators)—working in liaison cloned Dr. Alex Otti’s number and his voice (yes, on grounds of his quintessential Abia State governorship electioneering and scintillatingly profound public presentations being a first-class economist!) to fleece me of N450,000.
The target really was N15 million if I had not swiftly retraced on reflection on my way to Diamond and Sterling banks for the transfer of the second tranche worth N14, 550,000. The money was lodged into the account of one UMAR MUSBAUDEEN TUNDE on that ill-fated Friday at 01.32 p. m. Account number: 5858027015/First City Monument Bank (FCMB). I still have the debit alert in my handset.
This is the first and last time I will be a victim of horrendous dupery. It happened in the first place because of the respect I have for Dr. Otti and our robust relationship. In the past, I had received thousands of such calls and multi-media messages, which I promptly dismissed. The dastardly numbers used (excluding Dr. Otti’s cloned number) for the heinous swindle were: 08030440085 (whose owner/coordinator impersonated Dr. Otti through telephonic engagements with me) and 08148207282 used by the modern-day Jezebel pseudonymously called Madam Rita who claimed that their gang had a warehouse somewhere in Iyana-Ipaja, a suburb of Lagos, from where she carries out her duplicitous enterprise. She was the fraudster who sent the FCMB account detail after purporting to have a large stock of standard treatment hand gloves—which the impersonating Alex said were urgently needed in “Umuahia Specialist Hospital” in Abia State, where Dr. Alex Otti is currently engaging stakeholders on the anticipatory redemption of the diseased state.
This vicious dupery took place four days after I had written here about the inevitable emergence of Dr. Otti as the next governor of Abia, the worst state in the country in the past consecutive 11 years-plus.
The swindlers somewhat capitalized on that editorial profile for their criminality. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and First City Monument Bank (FCMB) should investigate this case and unmask the electronic bandits before they feast on more Nigerians and foreigners. It is this kind of syndicate that sends messages to unsuspecting bank customers after cloning bank websites telling them to send their personal identification numbers (PINs) for one transactional purpose or another on a daily basis, relentlessly. It is amazing that some people still fall victims of these online fraudsters. Mine is an exceptional case, cruelly coincidental and inexplicably circumstantial.
The bank account (above) used to syphon this money must have a BVN. On the part of FCMB, there should be Know Your Customer (KYC) critical element. The stories that I have heard that people open accounts for ad hoc purposes and close them down after thievish deployment are balderdash. In these days of BVN, banks and account holders should be held liable for any third-party intrusion or unauthorized utility of any account. I worked in two banks at managerial levels. You cannot open an account without a national means of identification to wit: National I.D. Card, Permanent Voter’s Card, National Passport, Driver’s Licence, passport-sized photograph of the prospective account holder and current utility bill like Power Holding Corporation of Nigeria (PHCN) document. And immediately after opening of the account, physical verification of addresses and other constituents on the account opening forms takes place before major transactions are authorized on the account. This is one of the ways to foreclose or minimize fraud.
Pursuant to the foregoing banking principle, the crap about ad hoc banking customer-institutional relationship is antithetical to best business practices and the threshold of trust that defines financial management vis-à-vis clientele background check and reckoning. My angst is not the loss of money, but the seamlessness of the fraud, which is made roguishly hassle-free for the criminals because banks do not carry out thorough investigations into the background of prospective customers. The obsession is to open as many bank customer accounts as possible without due diligence as statutorily required by law and other extant banking ethics.