A Staff of Ghana Telecommunication giant MTN is allegedly involved in the cloning of SIM cards in partnership with a criminal syndicate to steal some Gh¢2.1Million from the accounts of customers of Fidelity Bank in Accra, court documents filed by the state in court has revealed.
According to Prosecutors in the case of the Republic vs Stephen Arthur and 4 others, the operation of the Criminal syndicate came to light after a staff of Fidelity Bank who was contacted by the syndicate to help them with customer account details with huge sums reported them to intelligence officers at EOCO.
The Fidelity Bank staff was authorized to go along with the criminals.
One of the suspects, Nicholas Gyekye in the course of the investigation disclosed that to gain access to bank customers accounts through their phone numbers, he had contact persons inside Telco giant MTN who assist the syndicate to clone MTN phone numbers which is then used to access the bank accounts through generated One-Time-Passwords (OTP).
Under instructions to play along, the informant Fidelity Bank staff gave the suspects three phone numbers 0596257, 026586172, 051107*47 belonging to Ransford Nana Addo, Ama Ofosu-Kusi Addo and Jessica Eshun Ababio respectively to clone. The three reportedly had huge sums of money in their accounts.
The Criminal syndicate successfully cloned the phone numbers above and planned to withdraw ¢850,000, ¢680,000, ¢570,000 respectively from the accounts.
The four suspects arrested and charged and on bail over the matter include Stephen Arthur, Nicholas Gyekye, Ahmed Ansah and Daniel Kodzi with one other remanded and due to appear on May 17th 2022.
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