By Vivian Onyebukwa

Some Point-of-Sale (PoS) operators have been accused of swindling unsuspecting Nigerians of their hard-earned money by cloning their Automated Teller Machine’s passwords. But POS operators themselves are also accusing some supposed customers of fraud.

Yemisi Ojo, a POS operator who works at Ijesha, Surulere, explained what happened to her younger brother, also a POS operator. Shye said the man, Lanre, was swindled by a woman who used his POS.

She said: “One day when I was here, my brother who works for someone as a POS operator came with a gloomy face. When I asked him what happened, he explained that a woman used his POS to transfer N10, 000 to an account. After the transfer, she pretended to go get the money from her car while he was busy attending to other customers. And that was how she disappeared.”

As a solution, the owner of the POS business decided to punish him for his foolish mistake by deducting the money from his meagre salary.

She also recalled how the same ugly experience nearly happened to her when a man came to her shop to make some transfer. “He came with cash. When I asked him to give me the money to count before making the transfer, he got angry and started shouting at me. I kept my cool but something told me to be careful with him. What I did was to cue in the transaction in the system but refused to send it. But he did not know. I then lied to him that I had transferred the money and requested the cash. Lo and behold, instead of N20, 000, he gave me N12, 000. After counting the money, I told him that the money was not complete. He started behaving in a funny way, insisting that it was N20, 000 when he initially counted it. He started begging and said he had no other money on him. It was then I told him that I had not sent the money. I added that if I had sent it as he instructed me to do, is that how he would have paid me? He did not answer me but just walked away.”

Basira Muftau of Tolulope Ventures, Ijegun, Lagos, explained how she was duped by a dubious female customer. Her story: “A woman came to withdraw N36, 000. I keyed it in and then gave her the machine to key in her pin number. But rather than do that immediately, she cleaned off the last zero on the figure. So the money now became N3, 600 instead of N36, 000. Without checking, I paid her N36, 000. I was not to know what happened until at the end of the day when I went to give account to my boss. That was when we discovered that some money was missing. We were confused. But we were eventually able to trace it to the woman. The following day when I raised the alarm, people who stay around my business centre promised to help me track her down. But when did and confronted her, she denied it and initially refused to go to the bank with us to verify our claim. She obviously knew that her game was up. We went to the bank with her account number to verify. But her bank turned our request down, saying they had no right to go into the holder’s account without her approval. But when she discovered that the issue was beginning to generate a lot of reactions and interests, she reluctantly agreed to go with us. Eventually, it was discovered that what they debited her with that day was N3, 600 instead of N36, 000. We seized her property and a motorbike belonging to her brother who she had invited over the matter. We did not release them until they found money somewhere and paid. In fact, but for our kind intervention that day, enraged people who heard about the incident would have burnt them alive.”

Mike Okoro, who operates a POS business in Ikeja, also explained how he was duped by a fraudster.

“He came with what was supposedly N20, 000 notes of N1, 000 denominations. When I counted the money, it looked complete and I made a transfer to the account number he provided. It was later that I discovered that it was N10, 000 not N20, 000 he gave me. The trick was that the notes were bent over such that when you count them from one side, they looked like 20 pieces. But if you separate them and count them one after the other, it is actually 10 pieces.”

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Other operators told Saturday Sun how caution prevented them from falling victims to similar antics. Mrs. Yekini who operates a POS business called Alraf Ventures, at Community Road, Ijegun, Lagos, told of her experience. She said one day, an elderly female neighbour begged her to use her POS to collect some money she claimed that someone from her village wanted to send to her through Yekini’s account. 

Her story: “The person had called Mama and told her that he was sharing money to people in her village and asked after her. They told him that she was in Lagos. So he called Mama and asked her to go to any POS centre close to her to collect hers. When Mama came to me, the fellow asked her to hand her phone over to me. The guy now told me to pay Mama N150, 000. He said I should make it N170, 000 and collect the added N20, 000 because Mama told him how good I had been to her. He asked me to give Mama the money and promised to transfer the money to me. But I insisted on seeing the alert first before paying Mama. He asked me to give Mama the phone. I did. He now spoke to her in their local language or dialect. She ordered her to leave my place and look for another POS. He lied that I told him that I did not have enough money to pay Mama. From the way Mama reacted, I knew that he had told a lie against me. I confronted Mama. But to my utmost surprise, she confessed that she didn’t really know the man speaking at the other end of the line. She said that she was still trying to figure out who he was. She admitted that she only became interested in the conversation because he mentioned money. It was when the alert did not eventually come that I realised that he wanted to scam me through Mama. Who knows, he might have asked her to send him back part of the money.”

Yekini recalled another encounter in which a boy came to her one early morning asking her to allow her use her POS to send back some money said to have been paid into his account mistakenly. “The fellow had allegedly asked him to pay back the money into his account. The boy wanted me to do the transfer. But I discovered that there was no money in his account. He tried to argue with me. But I told him that it was a scam.”

In another instance, she said some boys collected her bank account number and sent to someone they claimed wanted to send some money to them. That person then sent them a fake receipt of N50, 000.  But there was no alert from her bank to authenticate his claim or genuineness of the alleged payment.  All the same, she kept hoping that the alert would come. Initially, the boys she was dealing with appeared agitated. But she asked them to exercise some patience until she got the alert. But they were making side comments that showed that they were in a hurry to get the money to travel with. They wondered why she couldn’t release the money to them since she knew the alert would surely come. But the woman held on to her original decision. Yekini said: “When they discovered that I was adamant, they left and never came back. After two days, I remembered it and wondered why they couldn’t come back. It was then I went back and checked the receipt and discovered that it was fake.”

She recalled another incident perpetrated by a man in army uniform.  The man, she said, came to withdraw N10, 000. After paying him, he brought out another N20, 000 and asked her to pay the money into a certain bank account. She did. “He gave me N10, 000 of N1, 000 notes. But my mind was not at rest after the transaction. I was moved to check the money he gave me.  I did and discovered that the notes were fake. His trick was to use N6, 000 out of the N10, 000 he collected from me. He then put N3, 000 in front of the fake bunch of money and N3, 000 at the back to cover up the fake notes. He was about to climb his bike when I shouted. My reaction attracted people’s attention. He quickly came back. I told him that he gave me fake money. He quietly dipped his hand into his pocket and gave me another pack of N20, 000 without saying a word and walked out.”

In the words of Yekini, a lot of fraud happens in the business and advised people with little knowledge of the business not to rush into it. She said: “People should know that POS operators are also being swindled by fraudsters. Bu to me, those POS operators who dupe customers are ‘Yahoo boys’ who are into the business to do just that – dupe customers. Otherwise, no genuine operator can indulge in fraudulent activities because they will be affected at the end of the day and that will lead to the end of their business.”

On operators who were duped, she attributed that to carelessness and presumption. She explained: “How can you do money transfer for someone without collecting your money first? Even in the banks, a cashier cannot pay in your money without collecting the cash first.”

Ojo advised operators to use Andorid POS. She insists that they detect fake alerts and this makes it very difficult to swindle the operator. “Whenever some people want to transfer money to you, in your phone you would receive alert but it is fake. One tried to do it to me. But because I use Android POS, I discovered it,” she said.