Ayodele Ale

By Ayodele Ale

I learnt of some nasty experiences in Nigeria during my brief holiday period. A church member was robbed of his phone and the within some hours, the account was emptied. All the earlier efforts and calls made to the bank by the elderly man to stop the anticipated illegal transactions were unsuccessful. The money was transferred to another bank where they used the POS machine to conclude their dastardly act, in tranches.
The guys would not have been successful if the bank concerned had responded swiftly immediately the distress call came in. The account was compromised. Even when the man has been enlisting the efforts of the police, that is a story for another day. Sometimes, these dubious guys empty the credit cards’ pilfered identities to buy items from online stores, which do not also cooperate when such ignoble acts are detected by victims. I read the story of a lady whose entire savings and fund for her petty recharge card sale’s trade was pilfered through items he never offered for online. What amazed the lady was how the online ‘bandits’ got all her particulars from one of the banks.
Within the week, I came across a recorded voice call, where the fraudulent caller was reeling out the BVN and bank details of the the unsuspecting soul.
Two weeks ago, my WhatsApp account was almost hijacked after they had successfully bulldozed through a friend’s link.
The disturbing trend is how robbers are now going about robbing victims with POS, even at night. due to the unregulated nature of the POS transactions.
The banks through which funds are being moved need to do something fast.
One of the reasons is the mindless way banks are busy churning their employees into the labour market, all in the name of ‘contract appointment’. An uncle was sent into the labour market by a new generation bank over the excuse that he was not meeting up with ‘targets’. Whatever that means. A cousin who was hired as a contract employee was thrown out after seven years. Many of her contemporaries in the ‘contract appointment’ field were equally given the same inhuman treatment by one of the new generation banks.
Gone are the days when the banking job offered comfort to employees. Unfortunately, some of the young folks being thrown into the winds are conniving with bandits and kidnappers, offering sensitive information to criminal gangs. The family of a kidnapped victim was once told that their kinsman would be killed if they ever tried to pretend that they had no money as they knew the family’s worth and what they had in their bank account. This explains why some victims are killed. Obviously, hordes of the ‘bank contract employees’ out there are so much familiar with the banking system that they can easily bulldoze the online security check. There is the need to urgently check this frustrating trend.