Published 28th Apr, 2023

By Ridhwan Abdullahi

At about 1am on Tuesday March 28, 2023, message notifications beeps started to pour in for Oniyedun Adeola, a father of three operating a point of sale (PoS) business in Olode corner of Apapa, Lagos.

He was not expecting a message from anyone for any reason, so he did not bother to look. But the messages kept coming, anyway.

“I did not attempt any transaction at the moment; in fact, I was sleeping when the alerts came,” he told FIJ. “I just woke up to see all the debit alerts without any transaction carried out that very day or even before.”

By the time Adeola woke up at daybreak, a sum of N621,000 had been debited from his UBA account.

“Just like that!” he exclaimed. “I did not get any OTP notification from UBA. And they have debited N621, 000 from my account like that.”

Disturbed, Adeola could not wait until the opening of business hours of the day before he headed to his bank’s branch. UBA requested a grace of a 10 working days to rectify the issue.

“They told me they were working on it, that they were tracing the account,” he said.

**A trail of debit alerts Adeola woke up to**

However, he was shocked to hear that the account could not be traced when he visited the bank after notice period.

“When I went there again, they told me the account was untraceable. They then mentioned that they had sent mails to their headquarters and were waiting for a reply.”

On the day he recounted his ordeal to FIJ, according to him, the two weeks’ grace had turned to a month, and he was starting to lose hope of returning to his means of earning a living.

“It has been a month now that they promised 10 working days. They keep postponing; I don’t even know again. I have not had any genuine reason from the branch, ” he lamented to FIJ.

“They said they were waiting on their headquarters to approve a request. I have been to their office over three times now. They keep saying the same thing. The delay is affecting my business. It is affecting my life.

“I am a family man with three children. It is affecting my family seriously. Even within my vicinity, movement is not easy, as I need to settle some people out of the money.”

FIJ emailed Ramon Nasir, UBA’s Group Head, Media and External Relations, on Monday, but as of press time on Friday, there was no word form him.

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