Internet fraudsters popularly called yahoo boys are suspected to have cleared all the money in the bank account of a Kogi civil servant , Mallam Ibrahim Zakari in Lokoja at the weekend.
City and Crime gathered on Tuesday that the incident happened when the victim who works in the Ministry of Water Resources went to a branch of an old generation bank to withdraw money and got scammed in the process.
Zakari was said to have gone to the bank to withdraw the cooperative money he caused to be paid to his bank from a cooperative society to handle a home front challenge when his ATM card got stuck in the system.
“I met three boys at the ATM stand of the bank initiating the transaction. Not suspecting anything, I inserted my card to the second machine that was free of customers.
“Suddenly, my card came out with a message “inoperative”. I inserted again, getting the same message, throwing my card out .
“One of the three boys told me to go to the next branch of the bank in the town where they claimed to have just withdrawn money to observe my transaction with ease.
“Unsuspecting, I hurried out to the said branch and got the same response from the system, making me to leave for home unhappy and confused at the weekend.
“Undaunted, I dashed out to a nearby Point of Station (POS) gallery to try a transaction the following day , only to be told that I have insufficient funds.
“Confused, I contacted my back on Monday; to my amazement, the bank officer told me that my money was withdrawn by 6.30am this morning through a money point system.
“The bank too told me that the ATM I claimed to be mine is bearing another name other than mine “, he said .
He added that it beat his imagination, to note how his data in the ATM card was exchanged swiftly.
“I have been using the ATM in question in all my transactions all this while ; I carried it out by myself from where I used to keep in the box for the bank transaction”, he said .
He lamented that the cooperative money of N50,000 and his savings were cleared out, without a dime left in his account by the suspecting yahoo boys .
