The National Identity Management Commission says it has uncovered a syndicate of individuals posing as staff of the commission and issuing fake National Identity Numbers to unsuspecting Nigerians.

It said some offenders have been arrested and are undergoing prosecution with relevant security agencies.

The NIMC Director General, Abisoye Coker-Odusote, disclosed this at a press briefing on Friday in Abuja.

Odusote at the briefing also announced that over 107.34 million Nigerians have been enrolled into the NIN database as of May 2023 from 104m recorded in December 2023.

The NIN, a unique identifier assigned to each citizen, has gained prominence in recent years as the cornerstone of various government initiatives aimed at enhancing security, governance, and service delivery.

Detailing their modus operandi, the Director General explained that these individuals masquerade as business vendors and cyber cafes, crafting links for unsuspecting individuals, developing software, and fabricating fake NINs. “This data doesn’t reach our server, resulting in numerous Nigerians falling victim to scams,” she said.

She said a further clampdown led to the discovery of a group of individuals around its annexe office.

The NIMC boss, however, declined to disclose details on the number of persons being interrogated but assured that as soon as the investigation is concluded they would be charged to court for cybercrimes.

Odusote said, “I am going to speak on extortion, data breach and privacy. When we carried out our investigations, we discovered that around NIMC’s offices, people were parading as business vendors and cyber cafes, creating links for unsuspecting persons, designing software and generating fake NINs for people.

“This data does not come to our server and a lot of Nigerians have been scammed. We record an influx of crowd, people coming into the office telling us that they registered but we can’t find their data on the system. We have a lot of these instances with citizens claiming to have paid money to people who do not have any connection to NIMC.

“They (offenders) have perfected the act of trying to mimic what NIMC does. So we decided to clamp down on these people and have arrested offenders. These persons don’t have any connection with the commission at all. We don’t have any internal data breaches because we have one of the best in the world.

“We will not allow them to parade as if they are part of us and they are not. A lot of people have lost money through this method.

He added that the commission got wind of the issue after a customer complained that she had paid N120,000 to modify her birth certificate.

There is a case I got at our annexe office and a lady approached me telling me that she had been extorted of over N120,000 to modify her birth certificate. And the person who extorted her is not a NIMC staff and all he does is create a fake birth certificate and other documents for a fee. This is part of the reason we decided to digitise our operations.”

She added that efforts have also reached the advanced stage for Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government to harmonise their identity database with NIMC for the country to have a Central Identity database.

The DG further stated within the next nine months the commission will upgrade the capacity of its database from 100 million to 250 million.

“Nigeria needs to exit keeping multiple identities of citizens in silos through different agencies, we must have a central system, and that is why we are upgrading our infrastructures.

“Obtaining NIN should be within a minimum period especially when our system has been upgraded, and we are building capacity at all levels from the network infrastructure perspective to software areas down to the database.

“We are working on increasing the capacity that we have, we are trying to increase from 100million to 250million, and the process will take us a minimum of 6 months to 9 months. But we are sure we will be there,” Coke-Odusote said.

On the General Multipurpose National Identity Card, she noted that Nigerians will have to pay a certain amount of money to get the new card when it’s launched through finance institutions in the country.

She said, “Just like how you pay to access your ATM cards in the banks, Nigerians will pay through the banks to access their cards within 48 hours after payment to get the digital multipurpose card.”

Punch