Commercial Banks block Transfers to Opay, Monie Point, Kuda Accounts over fraud

Commercial Banks has begun blocking of online Bank Transfers to Opay, Monie Point and Kuda Bank Accounts over increasing frauds conducted through these Fintech Bank Accounts.

The CEO of Fidelity Bank, Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe, who shared the recent development described the Finteck bank Accounts issued by fintech companies as safe havens for fraudsters as the finteck bank accounts have remained easy ways to move money from victims commencial bank Account to untraceable bank accounts.

She said: In order to protect our customers, Fidelity Bank has blocked transfers to OPay, Moniepoint, and Palmpay over KYC concerns.

Let me explain what this means. If you have a fidelity bank account, you can’t initiate a bank transfer to any user using Opay, Monie Point, or Palm Pay from your app.

Let’s say you want to pay a vendor N50,000 this evening for the services he rendered to you, and the vendor is using a Monie Point account.

What Fidelity Bank is saying is simple. Please, you can't use our bank app to do that.

The reason is not far-fetched. Fraudsters and Yahoo boys found a safe haven using Monie Point, Opay, and Kuda to receive stolen funds, and this is why

It is easier to open fresh bank accounts at Monie Point, for instance, than at your regular conventional/commercial bank.

If you walk into a branch of Zenith Bank to open a new bank account, they will ask you for a NEPA bill, a valid ID card, and then your passport photograph.

But for Kuda Bank, Monie Point, or Opay, you don’t need all those stringent KYC regulations. You can easily open an account with an Opay POS agent in less than 5 minutes without submitting the documents like the NEPA bill that a conventional bank would have asked you to provide.

The implication is that Yahoo boys and criminals have found a safe heaven using Monie Point and Kuda bank accounts, for instance, to scam people because they are easier to open and you don't need to attach any documents to open one.

My friend Maduka Fidorocks Onwukeme once shared with me how his bank account was compromised and hacked, and the money was swiftly moved to an Opay account.

One thing that struck him when he started investigating using his legal skills as a lawyer was that the Opay account that received the stolen money was created 30 minutes before the hackers struck and moved the money there.

Opay did not bother to ask for KYC (know your customers attached to the new account), and guess what? The money was withdrawn in less than 20 minutes through a POS agent. Immediately, it hit the new Opay account, but this did not stop him from writing to CBN to complain that his money was stolen by non-state actors and that Opay is complicit.

In less than 2 weeks after he filed his petition with CBN, the money stolen from his account was replaced by Opay.

And my friend is not an outlier. Scammers are comfortable using these 3 bank accounts to receive stolen funds, which they withdraw immediately through a POS agent, and this is a regular daily occurrence.

To prevent our customers from falling into the hands of criminal elements using Opay, Monie Point, and Kuda to receive stolen funds, Fidelity Bank has thought it wise to block these 3 NEO banks from the Fidelity Bank app.