Three days ago, Mary John, an Abuja resident, wanted to make some payments on her Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) account, but she received a notification that she had insufficient fund.

She thought that was impossible because just some days earlier, she had received some money for operational expenses at her workplace.

While recounting the incident to FIJ, John said she noticed that N264,094 had strangely disappeared from her GTB account when she was about to make some payments for her company on Monday, November 28.

According to her, the money was still in her account on that fateful day but she could not access it as she kept getting ‘insufficient fund’ notifications.

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“I asked one of my colleagues to know if she had experienced such, and she said it could be network issues. But my mind was not at rest. I needed to be sure and not make assumptions about the strange issue, so I decided to go to the bank,” she said.

The Abuja resident went to the GTB branch in Asokoro that same Monday, where she was told that her account had been compromised since Saturday, November 26, 2022.

“I was surprised because I did not receive any form of notification that a transaction was being carried out on my account, neither did I receive a one-time password (OTP), which is basically the means of approval for card transactions.

“They said the amount had not yet been debited from my account, but it’d been locked up and would be delivered to the recipient’s account in due time.”

Since John had not received any debit alerts at the time, she inquired about this, as well as why the bank did not notify her about the strange transaction.

“The banker told me that my account was locked up and I’d get debit alerts once the receiving account was credited. My card was disabled then so that it would be safe a little,” she said.

“I filled the form the bank gave to me for complaints.”

She further revealed that about three hours after reporting the incident at the bank, she received debit alerts for the missing amount.

“On Tuesday, I went to the branch where I opened my account in Area 3 for clarifications. I was informed that the other branch had already escalated the issue to them.

“I told the bank that if the amount was locked up in my account, waiting for delivery, couldn’t they have stopped it from going through? Couldn’t they have blocked the recipient’s account to make sure it was not delivered?

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“When I asked what the bank was doing, they said an investigation was ongoing.”

However, to her surprise, she received an email on Tuesday, stating that her complaint had been resolved.

She also told FIJ that the bank rejected her request for a refund because “the transaction had been initiated already and all the necessary details needed for the transaction to take place were provided.

“They said the money was initiated via my account and it was assumed that the initiator was the owner of the card,” she said.

“But the amount stated in the email was actually lower than the missing amount I reported on Monday. The email mentioned N203,154.

“In fact, when I complained about the missing money, the banker that attended to me corroborated the amount I mentioned, which is N264,094.”

Initially, GTBank could not be reached for comments on the issue as none of the bank’s customer professionals was available to speak during the 13-minute phone call put across to their official line. But responding to a message to them much later, the bank asked the customer to reach them directly, as confidential information would be required for resolution.