Olamitunde David Oseni, an Oyo State resident, has detailed how Palmpay, a mobile money financial service provider, rendered his phone inaccessible over a N9,000 loan.
Oseni told FIJ that the action was taken in March without any prior notification from the company.
“I had been borrowing the sum of N9,000 from Palmpay on a regular basis, hoping they would one day increase their loan offer to me. Whenever I demanded to know why my credit score had not increased, they would tell me that I was still a new customer on their platform,” Oseni said.
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The customer said he suddenly realised in March that he could not access his Palmpay account.
“More importantly, I couldn’t repay the last N9,000 loan I borrowed because of the login issues the platform had,” Oseni said.
When he called the company’s customer service unit to report the problem, they told him there was indeed a problem with his account.
Oseni said that the company locked his mobile phone because of his inability to repay the N9,000 loan he got from them.
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“They locked all the applications on my phone, so I was unable to use it for anything, including paying back the N9,000 I had borrowed from them,” he said.
“I had to get a small disposable phone so that I could use it in contacting my customers on WhatsApp and Facebook.
“I called Palmpay again using another phone and they told me to repay the loan through a PoS. But even after making the repayment through the PoS, the money kept getting reversed back into my account.”
Oseni said all the efforts he made to repay the loan proved abortive.
“After several attempts to reach Palmpay’s customer care line again, they finally picked my call, telling me that my existing loan with them had accrued more interests and that I was now owing them N13,000 plus,” he said.
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“I subsequently tried calling them again and again, but received no answer. After so many attempts to reach them again, I finally reached them on Facebook, where they told me that my account and my phone were locked because someone reported my account to an app called Team App.
“I tried to look for the said Team App all over the internet, but I didn’t find it. I then pleaded with them to unlock my phone so that I could at least repay the loan, but they still haven’t done that till now.”
FIJ sent an email to Palmpay for comments, but no response had been received at press time.
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