The Nigerian authorities are looking for a missing IT admin at an unnamed bank who is suspected of helping cybercriminals make off with 6.28 billion Naira ($38.6m).
The government’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission posted a wanted notice for 38-year-old Godswill Oyegwa Uyoyou from the Isoko South Local Government Area of Delta State.
Godswill, who is named only as an “IT staff of a new generation bank” is said to have “fraudulently connived with some scammers and hacked into his bank’s database” to obtain the funds.
“They most likely got through to [him] because he’s an IT person in the bank,” EFCC spokesman Wilson Uwujaren told The News Nigeria.
“One Saturday, he took the ‘cyber gang’ to the bank under the pretext that he was going to carry out some maintenance work, allowing them access to hardware, and they commenced to penetrate the bank’s database.”
He added that funds were then dispersed to various members’ accounts.
“It was in the process of withdrawing some of the money that they were caught,” Uwujaren claimed.
Insider threats such as this are growing in popularity in the African nation, famous for the 419 scam.
In August, the EFCC arrested three fraudsters after an insider at the bank whom they tried to persuade to install a keylogger on an internal computer decided instead to inform his manager.
The EFCC explained in a release:
“In the arrangement, an electronic device called keelog Key Grabber would be used to harvest passwords of some of the key operation staff of the bank. The grabber was meant to be plugged into the computer system of the Head of Operation of a particular branch, to retrieve information technology configuration settings from the computer system and pave the way for the fraudsters to move customers’ funds out of the bank.”
It’s not just Nigeria which is seeing a spate of such attacks.
In January, news emerged that credit card details of 20 million South Koreans had been stolen from the KCB credit scoring company.
After an investigation, the culprit was found to be an IT worker at KCB who copied the data and sold them to various marketing companies.