Monica Achong

Kippa was a Nigerian fintech serving over 500,000 small businesses. Bookkeeping, payments, agency banking through their product Kippa Pay. In October 2023, they shut down Kippa Pay. Naira devaluation. Shrinking margins. Business reality. The shutdown triggered a bank run...hundreds of thousands of merchants trying to withdraw their funds at the same time. In the chaos of that withdrawal rush, something unusual surfaced. One account was making large withdrawals repeatedly. Without a POS terminal. Kippa launched an internal investigation. What they found was: a senior manager had been quietly draining funds for at least four months. The fraud had been running the entire time, undetected and buried under normal transaction noise. ₦30 million was found sitting in his account. He was arrested in November 2023. Then released. The part that made this worse: Kippa had already sent emails to 40 laid-off employees promising one month severance pay. After the fraud was discovered, they never paid it. The employees who lost their jobs had nothing to do with the fraud. But they absorbed the consequence of it. The lesson is not just about internal controls. It is about what happens when you have no anomaly detection on your own internal transactions. The fraud ran for four months because nobody was watching the pattern. A single rule...flag any account making large withdrawals without a matching POS...probably would have caught it in week one. Your fraud detection cannot only face outward. Sometimes the threat is already inside.