Ghana Scamming is so Bad ZeePay Ghana Stole $800 USD From My Phone As I Watched

Sunday, 30 June 2024

By: TB Obwoge

Ghana is rated second in Africa as far as scamming, fraud and romance scams, the country is second after Nigeria.

Once I moved there I found out that there were several financial institutions that refused to do business in Ghanaa as well as Nigeria. PayPal, CashApp and some other financial apps won't work in Ghana, they blacklisted the country because of detection of fruad and stolen debit cards.

PayPal said fraud monitoring systems had detected troubling trends of stolen credit cards being used on the network from Internet connections within the blacklisted nations. Specific cases included credit cards issued in North America and Europe that were then used to receive PayPal payments in Africa

Source: Modern Ghana

Using an ATM in Ghana for taking out your own money from your bank in the United States is costly because of fees. I had used the mobile app for MoneyGram to send money to friends in Kenya and myself while I was living in Kenya. It was always affordable and easy, as they have Mpesa in Kenya.

Since Ghana also has mobile money, so it was easy as well. However I now realized that I should've watched my account balances a lot harder than I was. I often found that my account was off by small amounts.

However I will explain to you how I watched in real time my money being stolen from my Vodafone wallet.

I can't remember how much the Ghana cedi amount was, now there is a great difference from the USD to the GHC, so it would be muuch greater if I use the converter at this time. But I sent myself $800 USD, from my MoneyGram app to my cellphone number.

The money arrived with no problem, however when I was on the internet I wanted to calculate how much money I was going to withdraw from the Vodafone retailer. So I looked into my wallet, via my cellphone of course.

I saw the balance go down, the $800 USD was taken away, there was a message that the sender reversed the transaction. Which was odd because I was the sender of the money.

I instantly went to my bank account to check my balance there, the money was not there it was taken and of course the regular message was there, MoneyGram had taken it. I contacted MoneyGram, I was told what the message read on my phone, I was then told I had to wait up to 2 weeks before they would help me. Siting that the money would possibly return to my bank account.

I waited the 2 weeks, I was annoyed as Hell, mind you I have written several times how living in Ghana I was called 'Obolo' meaning fat, white, white woman, fat fatty, big biggie, bid mommie, big big momma and told how I wasn't a "real Black person" because of my skin shade. No one seems to care because well you're light skin that's what you get, they also call people 'blacky and darky' in Ghana.

Any way, after waiting the 2 weeks I contacted MoneyGram, they told me that the money was placed into my phones wallet. I told them it was reversed, I asled for an email account and how I could sent them this sceenshot. They also told me to contact the cellphone provider.

Calling any buisness in Ghana is a joke, they are very bad wuth customer service in Ghana, this is not me making this up you can locate several articles on how horrible customer service is in the country.

The lack of customer service training and awareness among service providers is a major contributing factor to this problem. Many employees are simply unaware of the importance of providing excellent customer service and the positive impact it can have on their businesses.

Source LinkedIn

I arranged for a friend that I made in Ghana, he was one of the only people that wouldn't ask me for a crazy large amount of money for a ride. Everyone in Ghana seems to want money from you when you're a foreigner, I didn't know any wealthy Ghanaians, where many of the foreigners lived segregated from the rest of Ghanaians.

I often noticed that I was always the only foreigner every where I went, the people I were with didn't have much money and they went to local places to eat and buy items. I also used these local places and they seemed unaware what any foreigner looked like, which I found so odd in a capital city of a major African country. Staring, pointing, laughing, acting very strange towards me for no reason.

Ghana is very odd that way, people stare as if they've never seen anyone who isn't dark skin like the majority of their population.

I digress, I asked Silvanis to drive me to the headquarters of Vodafone Ghana as the local shops couldn't help me.

We were off, the to the headquaters, there I talked with the first person at the only desk when you arrive at headquaters. She said, "ooh that would be ZeePay Ghana, there offices are near here!"

To which Silvanus said he knew where they were located and was going to drive me there, she quickly said she could call the office and get someone for me. I let her make the call, if it hadn't worked we would head to their headquaters.

She handed me her cellphone, there was a man on the phone from ZeePay Ghana, he repeated his line, "Sorry the sender reversed their transfer!"

Now here comes the intresting part, I had identified myself and who I was, I gave him my number so that he could check my account, he asked for some other identifying information. Prior to him looking into my account, once he told me the sender reversed the transaction, I identified myself again.

The man was now confused, wondering why I gave my full name once again, I then said "nice to meet you, sir I am the sender of the money, if you are looking at the transaction my name is the sender, my name is the reciever!"

He was silent, he stammered a lot, he then told me that the money would be in my account in a few hours. If it wasn't to contact the office again. The money was back in my account within 45 minutes.

Thank you for reading 🙏🏽 Please consider buying a coffee for Lacey’s House efforts in Gender Equality & Children’s Rights as it tries to move international.

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