First Bank, one of Nigeria’s largest banks with a market capitalization of ₦829 billion, has initiated legal proceedings to recover a substantial sum of money allegedly diverted by an employee at its head office team in Iganmu, Lagos, according to techcabal repot.
The employee, identified as Tijani Muiz Adeyinka, is currently on the run, and the bank has reported the incident to the Nigerian Police Force.
According to three people with direct knowledge of the incident, the initial amount discovered to be diverted was around ₦12 billion, but it has now escalated to approximately ₦40 billion ($29 million).
As a manager on the electronic products team at First Bank, Muiz was authorized to process reversals for customers and had control over an account used for these transactions. However, he allegedly abused this authority by crediting customer reversal requests to a merchant he controlled, allowing him to divert customer funds for nearly two years without detection.
The scheme was eventually uncovered when a customer complaint was escalated to the bank’s internal control unit, which discovered several suspicious transactions. First Bank obtained three court orders between April 4–8, 2024, to block hundreds of bank accounts believed to have received the stolen funds, including Muiz’s wife’s account.
The bank has remained silent on the exact amount of money stolen and how it was obtained, while requesting the Police to investigate the circumstances surrounding the fraud. Despite a decline in reported cases in Q1 2024, fraud remains a significant issue in Nigeria’s financial services industry, with major banks often falling victim to such attacks.
As the legal battle unfolds, crypto traders who unknowingly received some of the stolen funds through the sale of USDT have also been drawn into the case, with restrictions placed on their accounts. First Bank and the Nigerian Police Force have not responded to requests for comments at the time of this report.
