A 32-year-old undergraduate of the Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, Ilaro, Ogun State, Timothy Fashina, and a Benin City, Edo State based Proprietor of Resign Regal Academy, Benin City, Edo State have been arrested by officers of the Special Fraud Unit (SFU), of the Nigeria Police, for allegedly hacking into one of the GSM communication companies in the country, defrauding it of Airtime worth One Billion, Two Hundred and Twenty Seven Million, One Hundred and Forty Thousand Naira and converting same to money.
The Spokesperson, Police Special Fraud Unit, SP Eyitayo Johnson, in a statement yesterday said the suspects were arrested by personnel of the command. Jegede said the two were arrested for cyber fraud, money laundering, fraudulent conversion and stealing of airtime to the tune of billions of naira. According to him, the arrests of the suspects followed a petition to the police by one of the GSM operators in Nigeria.
He said: “the suspects were arrested following an Audit Report of the GSM which showed discrepancies between revenue collection accounts and fulfillments. During investigation, it was revealed that between February and March 2024, Fashina, working in conjunction with a yet to be identified 3rd party committed the crime.
“The 3rd party who is at large, who is a web/application developers of the GSM company, used Virtual Private Network to encrypt their data and to masked their IP addresses and compromise the Network of the GSM provider by utilising authorisation keys to gain entry into the Application Programme Interface of the firm.”
He added that, “The functionalities of the API were manipulated by Fashina to repeatedly replicate One Hundred Thousand Naira airtime ticket genuinely bought on the network to obtain series of multiple airtime fulfillments to the tune of One Billion, Two Hundred and Twenty-Seven Million, One Hundred and Forty Thousand Naira.” Meanwhile, Imonina, who is based in Benin City, Edo State, downloaded the Mobile App of the GSM provider from Playstore and signed in with the Phone Number of Fashina.
To proceed to the dashboard of the App, Imonina needs an OTP from the GSM Provider which the network automatically sent as SMS to the phone housing the sim card as at the material time of attempt to log into the App.
“It was at the juncture that Imonina contacted Fashina who promptly provided the OTP before the request timeout. Imonina imputed the OTP and was allowed entry into the GSM Mobile App of Fashina.
“Having gained access to the App and its features, Imonina proceeded to convert the fraudulently obtained airtime to data, using “airtime-to-airtime” options of the App and sold same using “share-data” option of the App) to fifty two innocent subscribers which included individuals and companies.
“The money being payments received for the sold data was traced to the bank accounts of Imonina who forwarded One Billion, Two Hundred and Twenty Million, One Hundred and Forty Seven Thousand Naira to Fashina, having deducted his own commission of Eighty Seven Million, Four Hundred and Ninety-Seven Thousand, Eight Hundred and Thirty Five Naira.