The police have paraded a 46-year-old suspect, Zakarriyah Yahaya, who specialized in stealing money from people’s bank accounts through lost or stolen SIM cards.
Yahaya, was among 40 suspects paraded for various crimes on Monday, August 16, at the headquarters of the defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), Abuja.
Yahaya said all he needed to access any account were the owner’s SIM card and his phone number.
In an interview newsmen, he said: “My name is Zakarriyah Yahaya, I was born and brought up in Jos. I was arrested last month in Mabushi here in Abuja. I used to reset any SIMs that receive bank alert. I will reset it and steal all the money inside the bank account.
“I do reset it with victim’s bank account number through bank code from the first to the last number. Any bank that we get, we first use it to buy recharge card, from there, they will send us the alert. From the alert, we will now get the account number.”
Yahaya said since he started the job two years ago, he had recruited about 11 gang members who are now in three main cities: Kano, Plateau and Abuja.
He was not able to remember how many banks accounts he and his gang members had broken into. He recalled, though, that they once removed N800,000 from one particular account.
Briefing journalists about their investigations, police spokesperson, Frank Mba, said the criminals usually acquire SIM packs in large numbers and re-activate old phone numbers people don’t use anymore to explore any bank account’s details.
Mba disclosed that Yahaya controlled multiple gangs of cyber crooks who specialised in going after SIM cards, phone numbers of innocent Nigerians, breaking into their privacy, stealing their banks’ IDs, and their money.
“They have two main modus operandi. The first is to go and purchase or acquire lines, the new starter kits in large numbers. When they get these, they tried to hack BVN.
“Experience has shown them that at this stage, some of our service providers are recycling old numbers. Persons who had used phones and probably for some reasons have travelled out of the country, or for any other reason chose not to use the number again, and those numbers are dormant and currently being recycled and being re-issued to persons as new numbers.
“They are very skillful and they have ways of knowing or decoding old numbers. So, when they put on their starter packs, and they are given options to select numbers, they select old numbers, and at random, they tried to explore and see if they could get bank details from those old numbers. That is their first modus.”
The police spokesman said at other times, the gang attacked their victims physically, collected their phones and removed the SIM.
“The second, which is very dangerous where they sometimes hurt innocent citizens both physically and financially, is through deploying gangs that attack innocent citizens, forcefully snatch their phones, or sometimes get these phones stolen via pickpocketing.
“Once they get these phones, their target is not the phone, no matter how expensive your phone is, they are not interested in that phone, that’s not the main target. That could actually be a by-product or a side benefit from the crime, but the major target is your SIM card.
“And once they get your SIM card, they tried to play around with it, and see if they could find anything that can link them or take them straight into victims’ accounts, and they had done these successfully.
“With that, if they get access to your bank details, they go straight to steal your money. The lesson for all of us here is that, we must guide our phones jealously. Even when you lose a phone or a number and you think you’ve got two or three other numbers or lines, don’t let your number go back to strange hands, go back to your service providers and do all what’s necessary, re-activate and re-claim your lines,” he said.
