Over the weekend, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) stated that combating electronic fraud (also known as e-fraud) would be aided by its existing cash withdrawal limit policy.

Musa Jimoh, the CBN Director of the Payments System Management Department, announced this in Lagos yesterday Saturday.

Additionally, he revealed that fraudulent transactions decreased by 35% in 2022 compared to the previous year as electronic payments continued to gain popularity.

Speaking at a meeting of the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum (NeFF), Jimoh claimed that the new policy would stop criminals from scamming innocent people since the withdrawal restrictions would automatically identify and shut compromised accounts before the money was taken out illegally.

According to Jimoh, “the incidence of fraud would also tame down as we envisage and begin to put some limits on the cash withdrawal that can happen daily—because right now, they steal huge amounts of money and then go to an ATM and withdraw everything at about 2 am to 3 am.”

However, you would not be able to take as much at this time due to the limits policy, and the system will be able to identify and block such accounts beforehand.

According to Jimoh, “this cashless limit is also a way of discouraging fraudsters from taking other people’s money.”

The top bank official discussed the advancements the CBN and NeFF have made in combating e-fraud, stating that they have successfully secured the finance system and payment infrastructure against illicit activity.

“In fact, we have reduced the prevalence of fraud,” he added. We are implementing strong measures to prevent fraudsters from accessing our payment and financial system infrastructure, and we have recovered a significant amount of lost money.

The percentage decrease in fraud incidents is between 30 and 35 percent. Recall that there are attempts and that some of them are successful. The large number of attempts indicates that they have been making an effort, but some have been unsuccessful, and as a result, money has been taken away.

“And because of the various programs and mechanisms that have been put in place to checkmate all those fraudsters and to track where the money is taken into, we also recovered high numbers in terms of the percentage of the monies recovered.”