Kaosarah Abdulrazaq, an agribusiness owner, was not a stranger to Samuel Eze. “He is an alumnus of my institution,” she said. A few years down the line, OurPass, a microfinance bank founded by Eze, has trapped Abdulrazaq’s N23 million under dubious circumstances.
Abdulrazaq told FIJ that Eze first contacted her about two years ago and persuaded her to bank with OurPass, but she declined. Eze’s persistence eventually won her over. “I believed most banks survived based on a customer’s deposit, so I decided to start banking with the bank,” she said.
As an agribusiness owner with multiple bank accounts, Abdulrazaq said she often used OurPass only for deposits. She used her other accounts for bank transfers.
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In November, however, when she needed to use the funds in her account with OurPass, Abdulrazaq decided to make a transfer from the bank app but the transaction kept failing.
When she contacted OurPass, they labelled the issue a technical glitch. At a point, she was able to make some N50,000 and N100,000 transfers, but the transfer option soon became totally unusable.
However, some patterns Abdulrazaq said she noted convinced her that the inability to use the app for transfers might not just be a prolonged technical issue, but a calculated fraud.
Abdulrazaq thought the money might have been “withdrawn from the backend”. She said that apart from herself, many customers have also not been able to complete transactions using their OurPass accounts.
“He has cases in different stations in Lagos. He has been arrested by Interpol over one customer’s N150 million. Even SFIU, he had a case there last month,” Abdulrazaq told FIJ on Thursday.
“They arrested him and he said he was trying to raise it (customer’s money).”
Abdulrazaq suspected the issue was beyond a mere technical glitch because if customers’ funds were still intact as shown on their account dashboards, Eze would not have said he was “trying to raise it”.
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Abdulrazaq said she also noticed a pattern anytime she tried to make a transfer. The app would initially show that the money had been successfully sent but the receiver would not receive the funds. Subsequently, OurPass would then send an email stating that the failed transaction had been reversed.
For instance, Abdulrazaq says her actual balance is around N23.35 million but the balance on the app shows only N21 million. OurPass hasn’t accounted for the N2 million balance.
“He has been arrested severally, and he would tell them he would pay back and all,” she added.
“When my lawyer contacted him last month and we gave him an ultimatum, he said he was going to be paying in instalments till 2026. But I didn’t do any investment, it was clearly a deposit.”
When FIJ called Eze on Friday, his phone was busy on another call and it remained so for about an hour.
FIJ also sent him a text message, but instead of responding, he called Abdulrazaq to ask why she reported him to “a media blogger”. He had yet to respond to FIJ’s text at press time.
The post OurPass CEO Samuel Eze Withholds Customer’s N23m Deposit for 8 Months appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.