From Joseph Obukata (The New Diplomat’s N’Delta Correspondent)
The Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mr. Mele Kyari on Thursday, issued a disclaimer for over 25 facebook accounts bearing his name.
He said that some unknown persons had opened the accounts to defraud unsuspecting Nigerians.
In a tweet posted on his verified twitter account, Kyari said that he has no active Facebook account since 2015, but has a verified twitter account which he use to communicate with the public.
“Beware of anyone posing as Mele Kyari on Facebook. A simple google search reveals over 25 Facebook account bearing Mele Kyari. I do not have an active Facebook account since 2015 and communicate with the public only on this verified twitter account. Beware of fraudsters:”, he tweeted.
The New Diplomat reports that there have been a spike in cases of identity theft on Facebook, with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) constantly being on the trail of some suspected internet fraudsters who specialize in identity theft and hacking into the facebook accounts of people.
Recall that in 2015, a Lagos-based musician, Lucky Adaeze, aka Dust to Don, was arrested for allegedly operating a fake Facebook account in the name of Ahmed Bola Tinubu, the All Progressive Congress (APC) national leader and former governor of Lagos state.
Adaeze was busted after someone reported the Facebook account to be fake.
Another Facebook impostor, a 19-year-old Student of Delta State Polytechnic, Emmanuel Eto, who was allegedly defrauding victims through internet while posing as former Lagos State governor and leader of APC party, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was also arrested by the operatives of the state’s Investigation Bureau when he attempted to defraud a fourth victim in Lagos having successfully defrauded three.
Eto who confessed to be an ND 2 student of Delta State Polytechnic Oghara had said that he created a facebook account with the politician’s name which he used to lure his victims with a job offer.
In the same vein, in 2019, the Port Harcourt zonal office of the EFCC, had arrested a man suspected of using its former chairman’s name to sought bribes from directors of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) to “kill phantom corruption investigations” against them.
EFCC, had on its website, urged Nigerians “to be conscious of the modus operandi of scammers and the different shades of scam (even though scammers are ever ingenious as new schemes emerge almost on daily basis)”.
Identity theft has become a major cyber security challenges for tech companies following the growing cases of impostors faking profiles to scam, steal identity and information to be sold or used to build up followers for their pages.
