Grace Ashiru
A Federal High Court in Lagos has granted Chinese-owned fintech behemoth OPay permission to freeze customer accounts across thirty banks. This decision is part of an initiative to retrieve ₦714 million that was erroneously credited to customers due to a system malfunction. According to court filings reported by TechCabal, the glitch, which spanned from December 10, 2023, to March 4, 2024, enabled customers to benefit from transactions that were technically unsuccessful.
Once the anomaly was detected, OPay reached out to customers who had inadvertently received amounts over ₦500,000, via emails and phone calls, requesting them to replenish their accounts for immediate debit of the mistakenly credited funds.
From these efforts, OPay has successfully reclaimed 10% of the total sum involved.
“While several customers have responded favorably to the Applicant’s request and collaborated in the recovery of the Erroneously Retained Credits, others have declined or neglected to deposit funds into their accounts, preventing the Applicant from deducting the value of the Erroneously Retained Credits from these accounts,” the company stated in a court filing.
OPay requested the court to freeze specific customer accounts, accompanying their application with an urgency affidavit. The court approved this request on June 28, 2024, prompting OPay to proceed with instructing thirty banks to limit access to the affected accounts. OPay chose not to comment on the matter.
Customers of OPay experienced transactions that were marked as pending.
Bank response codes are utilized by financial entities to classify transactions as successful, pending, or failed. For OPay, the code ‘RC 09’ signifies a pending transaction where the customer’s account is not charged. Nonetheless, starting December 10, several cardholders completed payments for these pending transactions but were not debited.
“In an oversight, The Switching Company (Interswitch), which managed these card transactions between OPay and its cardholders during this time, mistakenly processed all the RC 09 transactions as successful,” stated OPay in their legal submission.
