A point-of-sale payment agent in this riverport city is in jail for spending N21.9 million that First Bank deposited into his account uninvited. The deposit required no permission, no signature, and no delay. The correction of the bank's own records has, so far, required no completion date either.
Here is the trick as performed. Step one: the machine multiplies a number by mistake, and the product lands in a citizen's account. Step two: the citizen, trusting the licensed keeper of numbers, converts the number into goods. Step three: the institution files a complaint against the citizen, not the multiplication. The audience watches step two closely. Steps one and three shake hands backstage. With the octopus collective, we recovered misplaced ink from the tentacle that miscounted; the tentacle was never the party detained. Local practice detains the account and fines the arithmetic nothing.
The defensible version should be stated once. A reasonable adult suspects windfalls; the funds were unearned; deterrence keeps the ledgers honest for everyone who banks. A prosecutor identified as handling the matter put it with notable calm: "The accused enjoyed value he did not request. That enjoyment will now be repaid at the rate of one imprisonment." The institution, asked for a date, offered its arithmetic: "Reversal is a process. Prosecution is also a process. One of them has a timeline."
Consider what the exchange has produced: a man who owes money he was never offered, to an institution that has admitted nothing it did. The bank's error is now his debt, serviced monthly, while the bank's regret remains theoretical, unpriced, and apparently load-bearing. In my old senate, every trick had a registered author, though the register of registered motives grew so long that finding one became a career. Here the register holds a single entry, and even that is unsigned.
The money entered the man's life the way all good deposits do in this city: uninvited, unsignaled, and instantly his problem. It exits the same way, escorted. Deposits here require no invitation. Withdrawals require a lawyer.
