On June 5, Wema Bank and its digital banking platform, ALAT, announced they would stop all customer interactions on X. The reason was not poor service volumes or a platform policy change. Sec
On June 5, Wema Bank and its digital banking platform, ALAT, announced they would stop all customer interactions on X. The reason was not poor service volumes or a platform policy change. Security sweeps had identified over 70 unverified lookalike accounts impersonating their customer care agents, harvesting one-time passwords from users who had come to the platform looking for help with their money.
That detail carries the full weight of what this story is actually about. Nigerian consumers have been migrating their banking disputes to public social media timelines of fintech platforms because internal channels are not resolving them, and that public desperation has become a feeding ground for fraud.
Wema and ALAT closing their X accounts does not solve the problem. It removes one platform while the conditions that pushed people there in the first place remain unchanged.
To understand the scale of those conditions, Technext reviewed recent complaint threads across four of Nigeria’s largest fintech platforms: OPay, PalmPay, Kuda, and Moniepoint. What the threads reveal is a pattern that runs across the sector.
Social media is a banking hall for fintechsOn OPay, a user named Xocexor posted on June 9 that the fintech had spent five days giving him the runaround over an unauthorised debit of over ₦150,000 described on his statement as “Merchant Consumption.”
Another user, BimTop01, had attempted an OPay card payment for an MTN data plan on June 5, the transaction failed, and ₦125,000 left his account anyway. A week later, on June 8, he was still asking publicly for a refund. A third user, orimolusimedia4, marked nine consecutive days of waiting for the fintech to release funds with four red X emojis.
On PalmPay, the picture is no different. Clement Onomuodeke posted in March that an ATM card withdrawal had failed on a Moniepoint POS terminal. He was debited, the merchant received nothing, and after contacting both fintech customer service teams, the money was traceable to neither account.
Ayoifemi01, as recently as June 8, withdrew money from a cashbox, but it never appeared in his main account balance. Mysticalteee reported that PalmPay appeared to have blocked new message requests on social media entirely, leaving her with no way to reach support after a transaction error locked her out of transfers for days.
The loan recovery complaints on PalmPay introduce a separate category of harm. Kevmchal posted on June 3 that the fintech had automatically debited money he had set aside for an electricity bill, without his consent, to recover a loan he had planned to repay in two days. Adewuyi1150 posted screenshots in April showing threatening messages from a PalmPay recovery agent, including false accusations, sent before his balance was even legally due for repayment.
Kuda published a notice in October 2025 stating the fintech had stopped using social media for customer support entirely, citing account safety. The alternatives listed were in-app chat, email, and a phone number. That announcement has not prevented complaint threads from continuing.As recently as June 5, a user named Wixzy posted that his account had been restricted since May 19 and that he lived outside Lagos and could not travel to Kuda’s Yaba office for the in-person verification the fintech appeared to require.
On June 4, Promise Sunday reported that resetting his phone had triggered a funds-sending restriction on his account during what he described as an emergency.
These are not edge cases about user error. They are patterns about what happens when digital verification fails, and physical alternatives are either unavailable or inaccessible.
Moniepoint complaints from February 6 showed multiple users simultaneously locked out of withdrawals with no public communication about what was happening or how long it would take to resolve.
Lambactivity posted that day that Moniepoint’s social media team was calling users thieves in response to complaints, a detail that sits in a different register from technical failure altogether.
Read also: Digital payment fraud drops by 51% as Nigerian fintechs fight with AI – CBN report
The chasm between customers’ pains and customer careThe technical fault at the centre of many of these complaints across fintech platforms is not difficult to describe. When a payment instruction moves between networks, specifically between an acquiring terminal and the issuing bank, the systems involved must confirm each other’s actions.
During high-traffic periods, that handshake breaks down. One side registers a debit. The other side registers nothing. The consumer is left holding a transaction receipt and a reduced account balance while the fintechs involved treat the resolution as an administrative matter rather than an emergency.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) acknowledged in a recent sector report that innovation in the fintech space has outpaced its supervisory capacity. In response, it has required all acquirers and payment processors to maintain redundant connections to both NIBSS and alternative settlement networks, so that if one pathway fails during a transaction, a backup is in place.
The directive addresses infrastructure. It does not address what happens to customers in the hours or days between a system failure and its resolution, and it does not set enforceable timelines for when disputed funds must be returned.
That gap is the actual product of this crisis. Fintech platforms have grown their user bases rapidly, pricing out traditional banks on fees and convenience and absorbing tens of millions of Nigerians who previously had no formal banking relationship at all.
The customer service infrastructure has not grown at the same rate.
When complaints do reach support teams, the documented response pattern across OPay, PalmPay, Kuda, and Moniepoint is delay, generic replies, and requests for documentation that rarely produce outcomes within reasonable timeframes.
Richemoore7 posted on March 10 that it had been four days without any response from OPay to his complaint. By January 8, a user named Doctorbekky was documenting that a fraud complaint he had filed with OPay in December 2025 had received no feedback at all.
Read also: Nigeria’s fintech paradox: 11bn transactions, system failures, lingering trust issues – CBN report
The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s (FCCPC) Digital Lending and Online Networks Regulations (though currently suspended) prohibit unauthorised contact list access and data misuse by lending platforms.
The regulation exists.
The enforcement gap is why a PalmPay user is posting screenshots of threatening messages from recovery agents before his loan is due and why that post sits in a public timeline next to a complaint about frozen funds and another about a failed POS transaction with money traceable to neither party.
Wema and ALAT made the correct call in pulling back from X, given the scale of the impersonation threat. But the announcement framed the retreat as a safety measure for customers without addressing what will replace public social media as a functional escalation path for people whose internal complaints have gone unanswered for weeks.
