First Bank in trouble as employee steals N40bn, spreads to 98 accounts

According to TechCabal First Bank, a Nigerian bank with a market capitalisation of ₦829 billion has begun legal action to recover “huge sums of money” diverted by an employee at a head office team in Iganmu, Lagos.

The employee, now on the run, diverted those funds to 98 bank accounts classified as first beneficiaries, including his wife’s.

The bank is said to have reported the incident to the Nigerian Police Force on March 25, 2024, and obtained three court orders between April 4–8, 2024 to block hundreds of bank accounts believed to have received the stolen funds.

Three people with direct knowledge of the incident told TechCabal that while the initial amount discovered to be diverted was around ₦12 billion, it now stands at around ₦40 billion ($29 million).

As a manager on the electronic products team at First Bank, the employee, identified by court documents as Tijani Muiz Adeyinka was authorised to process reversals for customers, said one First Bank employee with knowledge of the matter.

It meant he controlled an account with which he processed those reversals and could credit merchant accounts.

Muiz was said to have used that authority to instead credit customer reversal requests to a merchant he controlled. As the last line of authorisation on the team, he allegedly did not need any further approvals, it allowed him to carry on diverting customer funds for almost two years without detection.

His scheme was eventually discovered when a customer made a complaint that was eventually escalated to the bank’s internal control unit. The control unit discovered several suspicious transactions and reported to the police.

“It was discovered that he made some fraudulent transactions to his wife’s account number (name withheld) domiciled with Zenith Bank, which in turn transferred to other beneficiaries totaling thirty-four accounts which also gave birth to second beneficiaries domiciled with other banks totaling 1,190 accounts,” the statement added.