A Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank) customer, Ngozi Njoku, has accused the bank of shielding a male employee who stole N600,000 from her account under the guise of helping her to set up her mobile banking application.
Njoku said that she went to the Egbe, Lagos branch of the bank on March 18 to upgrade her account’s daily transfer limit, FIJ reported.
She said that after explaining what brought her to the bank, a male staff whose name she did not know, advised her to use the bank app.
She said she told him she did not know how to use the app and the bank staff offered to help her set it up on her phone.
The customer said he asked for her ATM card and pin in order to set up her account on the app and she obliged.
She said she left the bank after he successfully set up the account and told her that it would become operational in 24 hours.
“But the following morning, I woke up to four debit alert messages totalling N600,000. What I saw surprised me, as nothing of the sort had happened before. I knew it had something to do with registering the app and with the man who helped me.
“I did not use the application to do any transactions after I left the bank. He told me the app would only work after 24 hours. They transferred my money to three different people,” FIJ quoted Njoku to have said.
She said she went back to the GTBank branch on March 22 to lodge a complaint about the situation but the management rejected her demands to see the male employee and gave flimsy excuses.
“From all indications, they are trying to shield the staff who downloaded the app for me. He downloaded the application on my phone himself. When they sent the one-time password to my phone, he input it. He did every other security-related thing as I did not know how to operate the app,” the aggrieved customer added.
She said that she got some policemen involved in the matter and they demanded that the staff be produced for questioning but the bank still refused while claiming that the order came from the head office.
“Now, the branch has completely washed its hands off the matter. The bank turned down all my appeals to help me recover my money from the staffer. This money belongs to a group of women, and I cannot pay,” Njoku lamented.
The bank has yet to official react to the allegation.