A private school teacher in Lagos, Idowu (surname withheld), is one of millions of Nigerians who had it so rough in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic, as her monthly meager salary was put on hold by her employer. To weather the economic storm, she sought an alternative source of income in mobile money transfer business, which according to her, requires little start-up capital but has a high profit margin. Without much ado, she kick-started her new business by getting a host payment platform, a small shop and a Point of Sale (POS) machine to begin another economic phase in her life. The experience was defining and rewarding for her until she fell victim to POS-related card fraud in which she lost almost half of her profit of six months at a go. According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Financial Stability Report of 2018, Automated Teller Machines (ATM), Point of Sales (POS) and Mobile Money were the worst hit of E-payment fraud in Nigeria. The apex bank revealed that ATM recorded the highest incidence of fraud with 34.87 per cent, while Mobile Money channel ranked second with 28.21 per cent and POS 19.55 per cent in the year under review. Describing her experience as a merchant in funds withdrawal and transfer business, Idowu said it had been a roller-coaster journey characterised by reasonable profit margin and potential loss to fraudsters. She said, “It was defining for me economically. I have had an improvement in my finances compared to when I depended solely on income from my teaching job at a private secondary school. But now, I don’t have to wait for my paltry salary to be paid to attend to my domestic needs.” When fraudsters called… But as tempting as the POS business appears, Idowu alleged that it has been infiltrated by swindlers and Yahoo boys who have successfully manipulated the system to defraud unsuspecting POS customers. She alleged that many of the POS points that litter the streets of Lagos are owned by Yahoo boys who hire female operators that track transaction details of customers with which they hack their accounts to steal from them. As an insider and a victim, Idowu should know. Narrating how she was duped of N60,000 in broad daylight in her shop, she said: “Beyond being a merchant, I have fallen victim to POS fraud. I opened for business on that fateful day and customers started trickling in to withdraw and transfer funds. The profits were rolling in and I was happy until a female customer with a man I suspected to be her husband walked into my shop. “They were neatly dressed and they smelled of affluence. There was nothing suspicious about them. The woman spoke to me in a humble and respectful manner after which she brought out her ATM card and gave it to me to withdraw the sum of N60,000. I inserted the card into my POS machine but it was unable to process the transaction. “Having tried it twice, I returned her ATM card to her with the excuse that the network was down; that perhaps it was her ATM card that had issues. Her countenance instantly changed and she began to plead with me to keep trying because of the urgency of what she needed the fund for. I told her there was nothing I could do unless the network was restored. As this conversation continued, I attended to other customers who were at my shop to either withdraw or transfer funds. After I was done with the last customer, the woman asked if it would be possible for her to transfer the sum to my account and I would pay her the amount. I said no problem not knowing that it was a trick to swindle me. She collected her telephone from her husband and began the transaction. After a few minutes, she called my attention that she had completed the transfer of N60,000 to my account. I told her I hadn’t got any alert and she showed the transaction details to me on her phone. “I gave her the money. She paid N1,200 as transaction fee on the sum, dropped her phone number with me to call her if I had any issue. I was glad and I continued with the business of the day. Hours after, no alert came into my phone. I began to be worried but I sought comfort in the phone number she gave to me and the poor banking network. I remained calm until around 8.00 p.m. when I called my bank’s customer care department. This was when I got the greatest shock of my life. I was told there were no transactions except for the N2,000 I transferred shortly after her own which the bank official said is pending. He said that was the only amount that was yet to drop into my account, being the last transfer I made before I closed for the day. I couldn’t cry. I was trembling with the realisation that I had lost almost half of the profit I had made in five months within a few minutes. I called the phone number she gave to me and she said I shouldn’t bother to call her line as she had gone back to Ondo State where she came from. And that was the end of the story.” Fine Yahoo girls? Idowu might have lost nearly half of her profit to a POS-related card fraud scheme but she definitely knew all there is to know in the business of mobile money transaction. She alerted the public: “After my encounter with the fraudsters, I consulted widely with those that had been in the business for a very long time. I was made to understand that since the fortunes of Yahoo boys are dwindling by the day, many of them have taken to mobile money business to defraud unsuspecting Lagosians. How do they operate? They scam customers through their girlfriends who act as POS agents. They leverage on the assumption that females are harmless. Many customers patronise beautiful female agents than males. This is the bait Yahoo boys use to defraud POS customers. They won’t identify with the POS point in order not to alert the public but the female agent is an accomplice. “Whenever a customer approaches her to either withdraw or transfer fund, she would claim that the POS machine is down and offer to use an android phone for the transaction. In most cases, they won’t seek your permission before she carries out the transaction using the android phone whereas an app has been installed on it to save every transaction details and pass code which will be used to hack into customers’ accounts. The public should be very careful about the POS agent they patronise because many people have fallen victims to such scam.” They drained me –Victim Another victim of POS fraud, Omotayo, wept when her bank account was hacked and she lost all her money to fraudsters. Narrating her ordeal to Saturday Tribune, she said: “I had used my ATM card many times during the week of that incident. I couldn’t identify the particular point when the scam happened. “I visited a POS point to withdraw N5,000 and after the withdrawal, I kept my ATM card in the usual spot that is known only to me. When I received debit alerts from my bank, I felt it was a mistake but when I checked my account, N10,000 had been deducted out of my balance of N111,000. This happened on a Saturday so I couldn’t visit my bank to lodge a complaint. A few minutes later, I received another debit alert of N10,000 from my bank. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked myself? Minutes later, I got another debit alert of N10,000. It continued until my account balance was N11,000. This time with tears running down my cheek, I hurried to a nearby POS point to withdraw the remaining N11,000 before I would receive another debit alert. But before I could rush down to a POS point, I had received another debit alert of N10,000, leaving my account balance at N1,000. I wept. I cursed the scammers but then I had lost N110,000 to POS fraudsters.” I was saved by grace –Cleric The importance of the banking sector to every economic development cannot be overemphasised as it implements monetary policies and provides an efficient payment system. In recent time, the sector has become one of the most criticised as a result of incessant frauds by bank officials and fraudsters. A cleric, Reverend Anthony Godson, who operates accounts with two old generation banks, escaped being swindled by a fraudster who posed as an official of one of his bankers. He explained: “During the lockdown, I needed some money so I gave my ATM card to my daughter to withdraw the money from a nearby POS point. Some minutes later, she returned and said that the mobile money agent didn’t have N100 as balance on the amount withdrawn. She returned home, leaving my card with him. She went back to him to pay the required amount and came back home with my card. A few days later, I went to a POS point to withdraw some amount but the agent told me that an error had occurred in the transaction and so I wouldn’t be able to withdraw. I thereafter went to my bank to lodge a complaint. At the bank, the customer care agent asked me to use my card on their machine which I did but the same message popped up. The machine displayed ‘Security Violation’ on its screen. I went back inside the bank where I was told an attempt had been made to hack into my account. He told me that there had been an attempt to steal funds from my account but it was unsuccessful. The bank official blocked my ATM card and issued me another one. “As if that was not enough, I got a call from someone that posed as a bank official. He claimed to be calling from one of the two banks. He said he was aware that I had issues with my account in the other bank and then requested for my personal information to reconcile the discrepancies. I was surprised. I asked myself, is it possible for a customer care agent of a bank to have access to the data of another bank? I felt something was not right so, I visited my bank and closed down my account. I was so fortunate that to be using my ATM card at the time the fraudsters were working on my bank account, otherwise I would have fallen victim to bank fraud.” ‘Blame the system’ President of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), Olusola Teniola, blamed the development on defective industry standards. According to him, the global standards on POS can be adopted by vendors in Nigeria which provide a level of additional security that the banks can interoperate with to determine fake or copycat centres that request for users’ sensitive information. He said the CBN should give a directive that every bank adopts the strictest level of security. This he added, would ensure, that there are limits applied to certain transactions that do not require a two-level authentication and user’s presence. “With these in place, it will be easy to track them and render these centres ineffective,” Teniola said in a chat with Saturday Tribune. In an earlier chat, he said that in Nigeria, people tend to be reactive, making systems look as if they were not tested before deployment. He said: “Maybe the systems are tested only in small pilot area or the laboratory and so when introduced to the public, we become guinea pigs. For the errors, they cannot verify if solutions exist. Some of the bankers themselves are trying to understand the system. They are also going through the motions of truly understanding how the systems work. That is why they can’t attend to you immediately. There are errors they can’t account for. That is the problem.” Teniola regretted that there is no one as an institution that can verify “the systems that we use,” adding: “there are no standards and so people can do whatever they want. Authorities at the CBN directed Saturday Tribune to Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS) as the appropriate body to speak to the issues of security in the deployment of e-banking services. Incorporated in 1993, NIBSS is owned by all licensed banks and discount houses in Nigeria, including the Central Bank. The spokesperson of the NIBSS said he was in a meeting when Saturday Tribune called. Outdated technology? On 4 January, 2007, in Watford, England, ACI Worldwide, a leading international provider of enterprise payments solutions, announced that NIBSS selected BASE24-es software from it to drive the Nigeria Central Switch (NCS). It was further announced that NIBSS would implement BASE24-es to provide interconnectivity and interoperability between electronic funds transfer (EFT) switches in the country. The platform was also expected to support a seamless integration of the Nigeria retail payment system with the West African Monetary Zone retail payment platform. NIBSS also reportedly licensed as ACI Proactive Risk ManagerTM to provide a fraud monitoring service to member banks. A statement from ACI further stated that “the implementation of the central switch using BASE24-es will create a more efficient national payment infrastructure by electronically switching retail payment transactions between commercial banks. The NIBSS, established by the Nigerian Bankers Committee, will operate the central switch that will also be used for switching transactions between other third party processors. “Their system will allow for greater efficiency to support the increase in citizens entering the banking system and the anticipated growth in domestic card payment volumes. It builds upon the same-day clearing and settlement of inter-bank transfers and payments established by NIBSS. “BASE24-es is an integrated payment engine to acquire, authenticate, route, switch and authorise financial transactions across multiple channels. NIBSS will deploy the software on a fault-tolerant HP NonStop platform. Staff from B2B solutions, ACI’s Nigerian partner, will provide local support. In addition, NIBSS will implement ACI’s comprehensive fraud detection solution to offer member banks the means to cost-effectively reduce losses and limit risk exposure.” The chief executive officer of NIBSS, Mr Paul Lawal, had said: “The successful deployment of the Nigeria Central Switch is of national importance, as a successful national payments infrastructure has been proven to be crucial to the economic development and GDP growth of a country. It was essential to select the right software partner to assist us in our objective. ACI’s extensive track record combined with the depth of functionality in its solution, the high standard of its professional services staff and its strong regional presence led us to select them as our software partner.” Richard Launder, group executive, ACI Worldwide EMEA, was also quoted as saying “the improvement of Nigeria’s current payment system will encourage investment and growth in the business and consumer sectors. ACI is proud to be recognised in the region as a strong partner in change. The African market is of great strategic importance to ACI, and the decision by NIBSS to license ACI’s software follows a number of wins in the region, cementing ACI’s position as a market leader in African payments.” With the ease with which fraudsters now compromise the much-praised security system deployed 13 years ago, is it likely the technology is outdated or the Yahoo boys are only a step ahead? The mystery remains while residents bleed. EFCC, Police speak Reacting to the development, spokesperson of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr Wilson Uwujaren, said he was aware of an investigation conducted into POS fraud cases but not the particular one discovered by Saturday Tribune. Equally, in its reaction, the Lagos State police command, through its public relations officer, Mr Olumiyiwa Adejobi, said: “We are not aware of the mode of operation. We urge the purported victims to approach us and complain. This is new and strange to us in the command.”
source https://chimaj98.wixsite.com/prime9ja/post/how-yahoo-boys-use-girlfriends-pos-to-dupe-lagos-residents