Fatai Ibrahim, a Lagos State-based retiree, has told FIJ how PalmPay, a digital payment platform, withheld his N84,000 after an erroneous transaction.

Ibrahim said he transferred N84,000 from his United Bank for Africa (UBA) account to PalmPay, instead of an Opay account, on January 21, 2023. The money was meant for crates of eggs.

FIJ learnt that although the transferred sum reflected in her PalmPay account, the beneficiary could neither withdraw nor transfer it.

“At first, she kept saying she had not been credited, so I sent her the receipt. That was when she drew my attention to the fact that I had sent the money to her PalmPay account instead of Opay,” said Ibrahim.

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“She later said that she did not want the money in PalmPay because her account had an issue or so,” said Ibrahim.

When Ibrahim realised the error, he contacted PalmPay the following day via its email address, requesting for a reversal.

“Palmpay has been unwilling to refund me, though I’ve done all they asked me to do. I sent the receipt to them. They also sent a consent form to the recipient to fill and send back to them, which she did. The form was to authorise them to refund the money,” he said.

“Instead of PalmPay sending back my money, they sent an email that the money would be retrieved by the originating bank, that is the UBA,” said the retiree.

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Ibrahim sent an email to the UBA regarding the transaction, and the bank promised a resolution on or before February 8.

“The money was frozen in the PalmPay account after we had sent the consent form to them. I have tried several times to reclaim the money to no avail. More than 20 emails have been exchanged, yet no solution in sight,” added Ibrahim.

The Lagos resident also said he reported the issue to the Consumer Protection Department (CPD) of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on February 21 but got no reply.

PALMPAY’S RESPONSE

When contacted for comments, Aramide, a PalmPay representative, confirmed the incident and noted that her company froze the money after the account owner authorised a reversal via the consent form.

She, however, noted that the reversal could not be finalised because the UBA had not contacted them.

“The money is there, but the account owner cannot access it. Except the UBA sends us an email requesting us to return the money to their customer, we cannot do anything. Kindly advise the complainant to reach out to his bank,” added Aramide.

Meanwhile, the UBA neither confirmed nor debunked the claim that it had not contacted PalmPay in order to speed up the reversal process.

A UBA customer representative identified as Damilola told FIJ that the bank could not give information on their customer’s account to a third party.

“Kindly tell Fatai Ibrahim to contact us so that we can know how best to address the issue,” said Damilola.