A report by the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum (NeFF) has revealed that 23 Nigerian banks benefited from N28.7 billion which exchanged hands in 460,000 transactions involving the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) Ponzi scheme.
The report covered six months between June and December, 2016.
According to a report by the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum (NeFF), 23 Nigerian banks benefitted from N28.7 billion which exchanged hands in 460,000 transactions involving the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) Ponzi scheme.
The report which covered six months between June and December, 2016, revealed that by the time the scheme was finally frozen on December 13, 2016, over N11.9 billion had been lost by its subscribers.
The NeFF report, which was disclosed on Tuesday in Abuja at a stakeholders workshop on cybercrime, organised by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), revealed that since the MMM scheme had a 30-day cycle before return-on-investment (RoI) was realised, everyone who put money into it after November 12, 2016 did not get their money out.
“No fewer than 23 banks received inflows amounting to N28.7 billion executed in 460,000 transactions through the MMM Ponzi scheme. The amount put into the scheme between November 13th and December 15th, 2016 (through interbank transactions) totals over NGN11.9bn. This amount was largely not recovered.
“To put this amount into perspective, the 2017 budget for Defence Headquarters is N4.7 billion. This implies that the amount transferred by Nigerians under the MMM Ponzi scheme would have funded the Nigerian Defence HQ almost six times over.
“Majority of the transfers made by customers of banks that participated in the MMM Ponzi scheme were made through the account-to-account transfer platform.
“This was followed by the mobile channel, and lastly, through the web channels of other transfer platforms in the industry,” the report said.
