Senator threatens to expose banks partnering MMM to defraud Nigerians

Commercial banks in the country used by operatives of the now collapsed ponzi scheme popularly known as MMM (Mavrodi Mondial Movement), will soon be exposed and made to face appropriate sanctions, the Vice Chairman, Senate Committee on ICT and Cybercrime, Foster Ogola, has said.

Ogola who made the declaration yesterday, during an  interactive session with key players in the financial services industry disclosed that as a way of preventing such fraud in the future, the Senate will soon come up with a legislation making digital education compulsory in both primary and secondary schools.



According to him, in the move to expose all those who were involved in the MMM fraud, an international expert in unearthing cyberspace and banking crimes is already in the country at the invitation of the Senate committee.

“We need to secure our cyberspace and financial sector against all forms of crimes or frauds as seen with the MMM operators who came in collaborations with insiders, expressly entered into the banking system, duped and bolted out.

“We have to stop anything meant to defraud us from getting or hacking into our digital system and the first step now is to expose all the banks involved in the MMM fraud.

“As a chartered fraud examiner, when the scam called MMM ponzi sheme came with its 30 per cent interest in 30 days early last year, I told people then that it was a fraud but many refused to listen and some of them later learnt their lessons in the bitter ways,” he said.

He explained that the essence of the interactive session was to gather the inputs of stakeholders to the amendments that would soon be carried out on the Cybercrime Act ahead of the resumption of the Senate in two weeks’ time.

All the financial stakeholders at the session from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to commercial banks, agreed on creation of centralised database anchored on National Identity Card as the best way of preventing hacking and cybercrime in the sector.