A Stolen Governor's Phone, a Prisoner Running a Scam, and the Man Who Just Lent His Bank Account: Yusuf v. State [2026] 11 NWLR 297 (SC)

A Stolen Governor's Phone, a Prisoner Running a Scam, and the Man Who Just Lent His Bank Account: Yusuf v. State

Case: Yusuf v. State [2026] 11 NWLR 297 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria

Can you be guilty of fraud if you never spoke to a single victim, never impersonated anyone, and only did one thing — hand over your bank account details when a friend asked? This 2026 Supreme Court decision says yes, and it's a sharp reminder that criminal liability doesn't require being the mastermind. Sometimes making yourself useful to someone else's scheme is enough.

A Stolen Phone Becomes a Fraud Operation

The story starts with a stolen phone — specifically, the phone of the then-Governor of Osun State, taken in Oshogbo in November 2010. Somehow, that phone ended up in the hands of a man already sitting in Ikoyi Prisons awaiting trial. He'd been incarcerated there once before, years earlier, and had struck up a friendship with a prison warder during that stint. When he returned to custody in 2010, he reconnected with that same warder, and the two of them went into business together — running a fraud operation using the stolen phone.

The scheme was straightforward in concept: scroll through the contacts saved on the governor's stolen phone, call them up pretending to be the governor himself, and ask for money. The warder eventually brought in a third person — the appellant in this case — expanding the operation. Both the warder and the appellant supplied their own personal bank account details to be used for receiving the money.

Using the stolen contacts, the prisoner reached out to people connected to the governor, impersonated him, and convinced them to send money. One victim paid ₦200,000 into the warder's account. Another — a traditional ruler, His Royal Majesty Oba Gabriel Adekunle Aromolaran II — paid ₦500,000 into the appellant's account. Both men received the funds, withdrew them, and disbursed them as instructed by the prisoner, keeping a cut for themselves along the way.

The Defence: "We Thought It Was for Bail Money"

At trial, both the warder and the appellant told a similar story. They said they'd supplied their account details because the prisoner told them the money was needed to help fund his own bail application. The appellant went further, claiming he'd never even met the prisoner directly — it was the warder who allegedly talked him into lending his account for the same supposed purpose. Both men said they'd handed the withdrawn funds to unidentified third parties on the prisoner's instructions, but neither could say whether any of those third parties were actually lawyers working on the prisoner's defence.

That gap turned out to matter a great deal.

Down the Court Ladder

The trial court didn't buy the bail-money story. None of the people who received the disbursed funds were ever identified as lawyers, which undercut the whole explanation. The court also found — on evidence that went unchallenged — that both men had received considerably more money into their accounts than what was actually mentioned in the charges, and that they knew full well the money wasn't coming from anywhere legitimate.

Relying on a provision of the Osun State Criminal Code that treats a crime's originator, those who help him achieve it, and those who benefit from its proceeds as part of the same team, the trial court convicted the appellant on two of six counts: conspiracy to obtain by false pretences, and obtaining the ₦500,000 from the traditional ruler under false pretences. He was cautioned and discharged on the conspiracy count, but sentenced to seven years on the obtaining count. He was acquitted on the remaining four counts.

The appellant appealed to the Court of Appeal, which noted that the prisoner who'd orchestrated the whole scheme had already pleaded guilty and been separately convicted, and that the two victims' evidence was essentially uncontested. The real question was narrower: did the appellant's specific role in the scheme make him criminally liable? The court found that it did — he'd knowingly assisted and facilitated the fraud, even if he hadn't been part of the plan from its inception — and dismissed the appeal. The appellant pressed on to the Supreme Court.

What the Supreme Court Had to Decide

Framed narrowly, the appeal boiled down to whether the lower courts were right that the evidence proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the appellant had conspired in and knowingly facilitated the fraud — essentially, a request for the Supreme Court to look at the same evidence again and reach a different conclusion.

The Court's Reasoning

What "Mens Rea" Actually Means

Before getting into the specifics, the Court revisited a foundational concept in criminal law: mens rea, the "guilty mind" that has to accompany a wrongful act before the law will hold someone criminally responsible. The idea is captured in an old Latin maxim: guilt doesn't attach to the deed alone — it needs a guilty state of mind sitting behind it. That's exactly why society doesn't blame young children, animals, or people who are legally insane for outcomes they weren't capable of understanding or intending. Mens rea isn't just doing something; it's doing something with foreknowledge of what you're doing and a genuine will to do it.

Proving What Someone Was Thinking

Here's a genuinely tricky problem for any court: intention lives inside someone's head, and short of an outright confession, nobody can observe it directly. The Court's answer is that intention has to be inferred — from a person's conduct, and from the circumstances surrounding what they did. Look at what someone actually did, weigh it against the situation they were acting within, and ask what the only sensible explanation for their behavior really is.

Applied here, that approach didn't favour the appellant. He'd been drawn into a scheme that was already up and running by the time he joined — so he wasn't its architect — but the evidence, including his own extra-judicial statement, showed he knew exactly what kind of money would be landing in his account once he handed over his details. There was no innocent confusion about where the funds were coming from. That was enough to establish the guilty mind the law requires.

You Don't Have to Start the Scheme to Be Guilty of It

This is really the crux of the whole case. The Court leaned on a specific statutory provision that draws a wide net around criminal liability: anyone who actually commits an offence, anyone who does something to enable or make it easier for someone else to commit it, and anyone who counsels or procures another person to commit it, are all treated as equally guilty parties. The provision isn't limited to whoever pulls the trigger, so to speak — it reaches the people standing around making the trigger-pulling possible.

The Court was explicit that this provision doesn't require someone to have physically committed the underlying offence themselves. It's aimed at people standing just off to the side of the crime — never touching the offence itself, but doing something (or deliberately not doing something) that clears the way for someone else to pull it off. Supplying a bank account to receive fraud proceeds, knowing what the money actually was, fit that description perfectly. The appellant gave the scheme's real architect — sitting in a prison cell the entire time — exactly what he needed to pull off defrauding a traditional ruler out of half a million naira.

Joining a Conspiracy Late Still Counts

One nuance worth flagging: the appellant hadn't been part of the original plan when it was first hatched between the prisoner and the warder. The Court of Appeal had already made the point, which the Supreme Court didn't disturb, that joining a conspiracy after it's already underway — with knowledge of what you're joining — is still joining it. There's no rule that only the original architects of a scheme can be held liable as conspirators; knowingly climbing aboard partway through is enough.

Why the Supreme Court Wouldn't Re-Weigh the Evidence

The final, and in some ways most procedurally important, part of the judgment concerned how much room the Supreme Court actually had to revisit the facts at all — especially with two lower courts already in agreement.

The Court was direct about this: evaluating evidence, weighing witnesses, and assigning it probative value is fundamentally the trial court's job. Once a trial court has done that work properly and the appellate court affirms it, the resulting concurrent findings get real deference from the Supreme Court, which will only step in if those findings are shown to be perverse, unsupported by the evidence, or the product of a genuine failure to evaluate the evidence that led to a miscarriage of justice. Outside that narrow lane, the Court has no business substituting its own view of the facts for the trial court's, even if another interpretation of the evidence might theoretically be possible.

Practically, this meant the appellant's real task wasn't to re-argue his case as though the Supreme Court were hearing it fresh — it was to affirmatively demonstrate that the concurrent findings against him were perverse. Simply repeating the same arguments that had already failed twice, in the hope of a different outcome the third time, doesn't meet that bar. Since nothing in the record showed the two lower courts had misapplied the law or mishandled the evidence, the Supreme Court found no basis to interfere.

Final Verdict

The Supreme Court found the appeal entirely without merit and dismissed it, upholding the appellant's conviction and seven-year sentence.

Key Takeaways

• Lending your bank account to someone whose money you know isn't legitimate can make you criminally liable, even if you never spoke to a single victim or orchestrated anything yourself.
• Intention doesn't need a confession to be proven. Courts will infer guilty knowledge from conduct and surrounding circumstances where direct proof isn't available.
• Facilitation is enough for liability under provisions like Section 7 of the Criminal Code. You don't have to commit the underlying offence yourself to be treated as equally guilty as the person who did.
• Joining a scheme after it's already started doesn't provide cover. Knowingly climbing aboard partway through a conspiracy is still participating in it.
• Concurrent findings from two lower courts are very hard to dislodge on appeal. An appellant has to affirmatively show the findings were perverse — simply re-arguing the same facts a third time won't move the Supreme Court.

Test

1. What is the subject matter of the case ?
2. Why did the supreme court dismiss the appeal ?
3. How does the supreme court's judgment interpret the concept of 'mens rea' in this case?