Kwadwo Addeah Prempeh duped two accommodations in the Netherlands with the same trick: claiming that he had requested his bank to wire the money, then pretending ‘delays’ due to ‘bank problems’, and finally not paying his bills at all. But how exactly did he do it? We researched the case and found hard proof that he committed fraud.

When Kwadwo Addeah Prempeh received an e-mail from his accommodation in Ede with an instruction to wire the payment of € 2,346 for his bill, he forwarded them the following e-mail:

E-mail Stanbic Bank (pdf)

For privacy reasons we blacked-out the recipient’s personal information. The original e-mail, including its source code, is in our possession.

Addeh Prempeh wrote:

“A very Good morning to you. I just had an email from my bankers that the full amount of the transfer i requested to be made for the accommodation fees has been approved and effected. I decided to forward the email to you so you can be checking your accounts for confirmation please. Thank you.”

The e-mail contained forwarded correspondence Addeah seemed to have had with Bamidele Stevens, an executive banker of the University of Ghana branch of Stanbic Bank. Addeah requests the transfer and Mr. Stevens replies that it has been granted and that the transfer can take up to 48 hours to process from Ghana.

So far, so good. But the payment didn’t arrive after 48 hours, and still hadn’t arrived a full week later. When his host inquired about the payment, Addeah e-mailed him:

“Good morning. Please i sent an email to my bankers yesterday and i spoke to the personal banker also this morning on phone. They’ve asked me to give them today and tomorrow to investigate and get back to me soonest. […] Could you allow for this period for me to get an answer from the bank please? Many thanks in advance.”

Three weeks later the payment still hadn’t arrived and Addeah mailed his host:

“My bankers did me a favor by allowing me to make an email authorization (which is normally not done) for them to transfer the first wire to you which was unsuccessful. […] Ghana at the moment is experiencing a lot of banking crisis and hence stricter rules of wire transfers have been imposed by the Bank of Ghana on all banks due to the continuous depreciation of our currency against the dollar. For this reason most people are withdrawing their foreign currencies from their banks and transferring them outside the country which contradicts the BoG rules and for me not to be seen as doing the same, i had to forward your email to my bank and based upon that i requested for an immediate reversal of my transfer before putting in a new request to be transferred to you. However, from what i gathered yesterday from my personal banker, the Head Office of my bank was not comfortable with the whole process when the second transfer was sent to them by my branch for authorization so they had to hold on to do a little check, and this i was told yesterday was what was causing the delay. For this reason, i decided to cancel the entire transfer and asked my bankers to rather fill my Visa Card account with more money for me to withdraw the physical cash and pay everything to you in cash. Now this is the whole story of what actually transpired.”

We now know this is all bogus. Addeah Prempeh never paid his bill. Not by bank, not by creditcard and not in cash. But when the accommodation owner contacted Stanbic Bank to inquire if the transfer Addeah had requested was wired at all, Stanbic Bank replied on July 9, 2019:

“Our Staff, Mr Stevens indicates he did not send the email response to Mr Prempeh.”

The response came from Genevieve Gadikor, the bank’s Fraud Prevention and Investigations officer. She cc’d Stephen Tefeh, Stanbic Bank’s Head of Financial Crime Compliance and David Gbande, Stanbic Bank’s Forensic Investigator. Interesting! Apparently Stanbic Bank treats this as a potential fraud case.

The accommodation owner e-mailed:

“Dear Mrs. Gadikor,

If Mr. Stevens did not confirm this wire to Mr. Prempeh, then your client committed fraud by abusing your bank’s logo and employee contact details to fabricate an e-mail to make me believe he wired the money to pay for his accommodation. Please confirm that the mentioned wire was never iniated by your bank. As this is a serious matter, I’d like to know what measures Stanbic Bank will take now.”

That same day Mr. Stevens called in person. The accommodation owner / creditor taped this phone conversation and provided us with the transcript. We quote only the relevant parts and condensed the answers a bit:

Creditor: “Is it correct that you are Mr. Prempeh’s personal banker?”
Mr. Stevens: “No, I am the branch manager.”
Creditor: “You saw my e-mail about the wire transfer that Mr Prempeh requested to you. What I understood from your response is that you never sent that e-mail to him. Is that correct?”
Mr. Stevens: “Yes, we never sent that e-mail.”
Creditor: “So that e-mail was actually fabricated by Mr Prempeh?”
Mr. Stevens: “It appears so. Clearly it was fabricated one way or the other because it was not issued or sent by myself. I am not sure what the legal implications are, so I have notified my legal team and will comply with whatever actions they advise.”
Creditor: “So the money was never wired?”
Mr. Stevens: “No, that is clear. If it was wired, you would have received it, usually the same day, worst case the next day. The e-mail itself is not factual. If your bankers did not confirm either, then this means the transfer wasn’t done.”

It’s now 100% evident that Addeah Prempeh made up / forged the correspondence with his bank to mislead his creditor and make him believe the money had been wired. This is a clear case of fraud. If Stanbic Bank follows the integrity procedures that most banks would follow, they will likely block him as a customer and file an official report for fraud with the police in Ghana.

On August 9 and 12, 2019, Stephen Tefeh, Stanbic Bank’s Head of FCC, followed-up:

“Your concerns are well noted. I can assure you that Stanbic Bank is taking steps to write the wrong, we cannot ignore such a serious matter which involves tampering with our official correspondence.”

This was not the only case in which Kwadwo Addeah Prempeh committed forgery and fraud. Als you can read in this article he also commited fraud with his diplomas and transcripts.