The news:
- Flutterwave has allegedly lost ₦11 billion to a security breach in April 2024.
- According to TechCabal, the perpetrators of the breach illegally transferred ₦11 billion ($7.2 million) to several accounts in small amounts that would not trigger fraud checks.
- The company, however, said that customer funds were not affected by the breach.
In a statement to Techpoint Africa, Flutterwave said that attempts to compromise security systems are common in the financial services industry.
While it did confirm the amount lost to the breach, it said that it "detected unauthorized activities inconsistent with usual customer behaviour on one of our platforms used by a small subset of our customer base."
It, however, assured that no customer funds or data have been compromised in the breach.
Although the company spoke little about the breach, one source told TechCabal that the amount lost to the breach was at least ₦20 billion.
Another that has knowledge of the incident said that the stolen funds were transferred to other financial institutions within four days.
This is the fourth breach Flutterwave has suffered since the first one was reported in March 2023.
According to court documents seen by Techpoint Africa, over ₦2.9 billion was illegally transferred from Flutterwave accounts to about 107 accounts across 27 banks and financial institutions.
Although reported in March, the breach happened in February. The fintech was able to get a court order to freeze accounts involved in the breach, however, the court ordered banks to unfreeze accounts in connection with the breach in February 2024.
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After the over ₦2.9 billion breach, Techpoint Africa learned of beneficiaries of another set of ₦250 million($543,088) and ₦200 million ($434,470) transactions who were reportedly detained by the Police.
The beneficiaries said that the money was the proceeds of a cryptocurrency sale to a Chinese merchant. This year 2024, it was also revealed that Flutterwave was attempting to recover $24 million lost to illegal transfers.
The company also noted that security is a problem in the entire payment ecosystem and presents an opportunity for players to collaborate.
While Flutterwave says no customer funds were affected, the repeated breaches could dampen customer trust in the fintech unicorn,
