HIDING THE VEIL: OF REMOTE COMPANIES, SCAMS, AND DATA THEFT

HIDING THE VEIL: OF REMOTE COMPANIES, SCAMS, AND DATA THEFT

Some weeks ago, BBC researched a particular online-only company that employed a ton of employees and it turned out to be a total sham. In Nigeria, many have been invited to jobs only to be declared missing and the said company declared non-existent. We have heard of several companies with no physical offices in different countries. It is part of the new normal to have companies run online alone and not have a physical office. In searching for the face behind some loan shark apps, I have discovered that many of them were not even registered companies under any country’s company law. They only register applications on Google Playstore and start advertising using google ads. Many become gullible and download the same and collect loans and the result is always a mess. Most of these apps gained access to users' phonebooks, some even track location of the user. Recently, the joint task force in Nigeria set up to punish unscrupulous lending services in Nigeria led by FCCPC , locked up five loan shark companies. There are companies with physical offices that carry out money lending business. There are many others online that are not registered dealing only through apps. As we have such in money lending business, we have a lot of traders on social media, especially on Instagram, supposedly rendering services and defrauding people of huge sums of money. We are moving to a time where we will have a lot of online businesses and companies without physical offices, are we not setting ourselves up for a lot of problems?

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One of the major problems of leaving the digital economy without a proper face is collecting data. If we are not even talking about online security, we in Nigeria should be wary of releasing data on all apps we see, knowing that a lot of persons can get kidnapped or missing through the data we drop or even gain access to our location and sensitive data. Those who have received messages from the loan apps would wonder how they got their numbers. They got the same from their customers who probably gave out the contacts unknowingly or even desperately (read my post on data commercialization .) Now, if a company have close to a hundred thousand users it means they have the phonebook of all these persons, it means the loan app developer has access to a great database. Imagine if the database is handed over to a criminal base. The evil that will happen after such will be loud.

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Online security might be so loud that we have heard it a lot that we thought it is just about passwords, pin and two/multi-factor authentication. It is more than that. No matter how well you know about those, if you voluntarily submit your data to a con-network you are a ‘goner’. So when downloading apps from the play store or App store you may need to look for the developers. Who are the people behind the app? Is it a registered company in a country? If yes, which country? Try to check the company out on the corporate affairs registry of the country to know if it is a sham or a facade.

An article on Techpadi identified how to identify a fake business online looking for the following tips;

"1. No connection/link to a (business website) or the operator of the account

2. Look for reviews on the vendor from previous buyers, ask questions.

3. Have many product posts but little or no post on delivery or customer satisfaction.

4. No satisfactory reviews from buyers.

5. Hilarious and unending discounts. Fake business accounts will always offer luxury goods at a steep discount

6. Its followers are random or unreal: if you see a business account that has a bunch of followers with no consistent people commenting on or reviewing their products then you need to make a more intensive research on the account before patronizing.

7. Follows a lot of other accounts.

8. Zero backlinks to the account: the business isn’t tagged in any post.

9. It was recently created or has no post as to when it was created. For example, an account that was created in 2018 started posting in 2022

10. Many contents are shared on the same day.

11. Use an escrow service for your transaction.

What is an escrow service? Escrow financial service is an intermediary service that receives and secures payment from a buyer, and then releases it to the seller when the buyer has received the transacted goods or services in pre-agreed condition."

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However, seeing a company registered on the company’s registry does not even give the company authenticity, I am not sure if the Nigerian Corporate Affairs Commission has a way of checking the authenticity of the company directors during registration. Or do they just believe that the credentials filed are genuine without checking? It is possible to register an account with deepfakes in a country where you can buy a pre-registered sim with non-existent names. Is it not possible to use a fake address to record companies on the CAC website? Too bad, this is the age we are going to where it is now easy to do business without seeing the people who are behind the same. I understand the international standard of ease of doing business have allowed so many things but we must be watchful. How then do we make people accountable for their businesses? If on Instagram, you can have a catfish account run a business and dupe people successfully and it takes a lot of investigation to get these people to book, we must be watchful. We might need to do a lot of due diligence to know which company we are giving our data to, submitting to a terrorist organisation or a hacker base will not be funny.

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As countries try to regulate the digital economy there should be a way to ensure that most online companies engage in proper due diligence before entering a business. Advertising companies should not just collect money but must be compelled to do a background check on the company they are advertising for. Yes, it is good to report apps on AppStore, fraud accounts on social media and others but far more than that there should be a better way. Compelling social media companies to do proper Know Your Customer(KYC) will go a long way to help. The company’s registry should also verify the identification documents of directors of the company submitted. Directors' identity verification and physical address verification is now very important. I know people will say what about companies that only have online addresses alone or metaverse based companies, we should know the people behind the veil and get their details down so we can hold them accountable for any evil action perpetrated by the company. We must note that this is not an action to stifle the innovations in the digital economy. Still, a properly regulated economy is a safe economy and that is what I advocate for.

?“Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.”?Alan Greenspan

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