The Olusegun Alebiosu led First Bank of Nigeria Limited has witnessed yet another fraud scandal as a staff of the old generation bank, Tijani Muiz Adeyinka, is currently on the run after he was discovered to be enmeshed in a N40 billion fraud.
First Bank, which has a market
capitalisation of ₦829 billion has begun legal action to recover “huge sums of
money” allegedly diverted by Adeyinka, an employee at a head office team in
Iganmu, Lagos.
Adeyinka allegedly diverted those
funds to 98 bank accounts classified as first beneficiaries, including his
wife’s account.
The bank reported the incident to the Nigerian Police Force on March 25, 2024, and obtained three court orders between April 4–8, 2024 to block hundreds of bank accounts believed to have received the stolen funds.
Gathered that while the initial amount
discovered to be diverted was around ₦12 billion, it now stands at around ₦40
billion ($29 million).
Adeyinka, a manager on the electronic
products team at First Bank, allegedly authorised the process of reversals for
customers.
Adeyinka controlled an account with
which he processed those reversals and could credit merchant accounts.
The banker allegedly used that
authority to instead credit customer reversal requests to a merchant he
controlled. As the last line of authorisation on the team, he allegedly did not
need any further approvals, it allowed him to carry on diverting customer funds
for almost two years without detection.
His scheme was eventually discovered
when a customer made a complaint that was eventually escalated to the bank’s
internal control unit. The control unit discovered several suspicious
transactions and reported to the police.
“We hereby bring to your notice the
discovery of fraudulent transactions into various transactions within and
outside the bank and request your good offices to set up the machinery of
investigation in place with a view to unravel the circumstances surrounding the
said fraud and get the culprits arrested to face the wrath of the law,” read a
letter dated May 10, 2024, from First bank to the Lagos State Commissioner of
Police.
“I discovered that one Muiz Tijani
Adeyinka, a former staff of First Bank was involved in the nefarious posting of
fraudulent transactions,” read a statement from the investigating Police
officer in charge of the case signed March 26, 2024.
“It was discovered that he made some
fraudulent transactions to his wife’s account number (name withheld) domiciled
with Zenith Bank, which in turn transferred to other beneficiaries totaling thirty-four
accounts which also gave birth to second beneficiaries domiciled with other
banks totaling 1,190 accounts,” the statement added.
First Bank obtained an order on April
8 to block the bank accounts of the first and second beneficiaries of the
illegally obtained funds from a Federal High Court in Lagos. The bank also
obtained additional orders dated April 8 and May 5 from a Jalingo and a Lagos
high court to block additional accounts believed to be involved in the
incident.
One first beneficiary account
reportedly used some of the stolen funds to buy the stablecoin USDT from
several crypto traders detailing their bank accounts.
Those traders claimed their only
involvement was selling USDT and denied knowing the funds they received were
proceeds of fraud. They have now been drawn into a legal battle with the bank
with restrictions on their accounts at the time of this report.
Efforts to make Chinwe Bode-Akinwade
react to the development did not yield positive result, as she was yet to
respond to our inquiry as at the time of filing this report
Credit: TechCabal
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