The treasury of one of the new generation banks, Polaris Bank has been emptied to the tune of N2,788,000,000.00 (Two Billion, Seven Hundred and Eighty-Eight Million Naira) by alleged cyber criminals otherwise known as ‘Yahoo boys’.
The trio of Osuji Victor ‘m’, Yahaya Suleiman ‘m’, Dahiru Garba ‘m’ and Oloko Kolawole ‘m’ and others at large between 30th November, 2018 and 2nd December 2018 at Lagos within the jurisdiction of the Federal High Court conspired together to commit felonies, to wit, fraudulent interference on computer system, knowingly without authority cause loss of property to another through computer related fraud of Polaris Bank Accounts and thereby committed an offence punishable under Section 27(1) (b) of Cyber-Crime Prohibition Prevention ECT Act, 2015.The accused were also accused of preventing the bank’s Computer System and any parts thereof from functioning in accordance with its intended purpose, knowingly and without authority manipulated the accounts of 12 customers of Polaris Bank by inflating them.
The accused through cyber crime hold on the system of the bank and were able to achieve their aims of defrauding Polaris Bank to the tune of N2.7 billion.One of the accused, Dahiru Garba who maintained an account with the bank with account number 4091142604 withdrew N95,000,000.00 (Ninety-Five Million Naira) which was fraudulently credited to his account.Another one, Oloko Kolawole on 4th of December 2018 with account number 4110014752 withdrew N198,404,000.00 (One Hundred and Four Thousand Naira).
The accused were caught and arraigned before the Federal High Court sitting in Lagos around March 2021. The sitting judge we gathered strike out the case after the accused failed to appear in court on several sittings, this is as a result of police and Polaris Bank‘s negligence.Till now neither police or management of Polaris Bank is doing nothing to look for the criminals which means they have automatically forfeited a whooping N2.7b customers’ money to criminals.
