Africa’s payment company Flutterwave has confirmed freezing of some of its accounts and mobile money wallets in Kenya following High Court order.
In a statement, the company downplayed the new development terming it as ‘a normal procedure and nothing more’ which should not worry the public and its customers.
According to Wendy, Flutterwave Head of Branding and Story Telling, closure of the accounts is connected to suspicious transactions detected by the company on its network sometimes last year. The matter was reported to law enforcement agencies in Nigeria.
“We do confirm that some of our accounts have been frozen by the High Court in Nairobi for 14 days. It is important to highlight that this is a procedural step in such civil cases, and nothing more. We are of the view that the article(s) intentionally sensationalizes the matter and seeks to cast doubt on our operations,” says Wendy.
“Important to note is that last year, during our routine Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, we noticed that a few companies were using our platform to process payments for a company named 86FB/86Z. We identified that some direct merchants of Flutterwave were processing transactions on our platform for 86FB/86Z without our approval or authorization to do so,” she said.
In May 2022, Flutterwave said it suspended a merchant who was processing 86FB/86Z transactions via Flutterwave, without authorization to perform such transactions. Flutterwave had discovered this merchant and its illegal transactions during its regular audit of merchants and found 86FB/86Z sports betting transactions to be a ponzi scheme.
Thousands of Nigerians fell victim to the 86fb platform ponzi scheme, losing an estimated over USD 400 Million (N200 billion). Over 2,000 Nigerian victims of the Ponzi, last year attempted to join the suit by the Kenyan Asset Recovery Agency (ARA) against Flutterwave in a bid to get a share in the various Flutterwave accounts frozen by the ARA, for which the payment company has now been cleared of any wrongdoing and their attempt to join failed.
“As a result, we notified the merchants to cease processing, settled all due funds and suspended their use of the Flutterwave platform. In addition to this, the case was reported to the appropriate regulatory and law enforcement bodies in Nigeria.”
Flutterwave is one of Africa’s largest payment gateway companies in Africa facilitating cross-border transactions in multiple currencies. It is based in Nigeria (Lagos) and USA (San Francisco).
The company, which was last valued at more than $3 billion, has raised more than $450 million in VC funding and is preparing for an initial public offering.
