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.
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.”
Source: punch
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