Published 20th Apr, 2022

By Emmanuel Uti

There many who wonder how people like Imu Ovaioza Yunusa, founder and CEO of Ovaioza Farm Produce Storage Business (OFPSB), manage to fleece numerous Nigerians of their hard-earned money, and to the tune of billions. Sometimes the people are gullible, other times the ‘businessmen’ are indeed smooth.

Look at Ovaioza. The ‘fake entrepreneur’ defrauded Nigerians of billions of naira, discontinuing payment of Returns on Investment (ROI) to her investors since the first quarter of 2022. Through her well-articulated posts on Facebook, the CEO of OFPSB made her unsuspecting victims fall for her fraudulent scheme in their hundreds.

A PREACHER OF LOVE AND KINDNESS

If there was an event like ‘Virtue Signaling’ at the Olympics, Ovaioza would have won several gold medals for Nigeria in that category. She was a master at it.

She trapped many Nigerians in her game of hypocrisy by constantly preaching about love, kindness and other moral values.

On March 6, Ovaioza said she was a fan of love and kindness.

“I am very big on love, loyalty, trust, and kindness,” she said in one of her posts.

Prior to that, she had preached about kindness, encouraging her fans to always help one another.

“Show kindness to those who are kind and be generous to those who are generous so that we can reduce the number of ingrates who go about saying, ‘They stopped helping because I thought I would die, but God raised someone else,'” she said.

Her teeming fans would always embrace all she preached, never suspecting they were being deceived.

Her messages on kindness were skewed to make Nigerians fall for her scam.

“Being unkind has nothing to do with a refusal to give,” she said on one of her posts in February.

A STRONG WOMAN

Like most internet celebrities would do to their fans, Ovaioza was always very quick to tell her fans about her strength. She would, from time to time, let her audience in on her entrepreneurial journey. However, in reality, the intention was to lure them into an already-set trap.

“In awe of my strength in pulling through the frustration that comes with running a business,” she once said after returning to her base from a lengthy road journey.

The question is, “Do strong people defraud unsuspecting investors?”

SHE COERCES PEOPLE TO DO BUSINESS WITH HER

Ovaioza knew from the onset that Nigerians do not find it easy to believe things posted on social media platforms, so she would constantly guilt trip her followers by saying ‘Misery loves company’.

She won her investors’ trust with her charm.

She also hit them hard when the trust had become ‘full blown’.

“Only a terrible person waits to hear dreadful stories about a business or someone to validate their hustle,” she subtly said on March 2, while coercing people into doing business with her.

A MOTIVATIONAL THOUGHT LEADER

“I told you before and I will told you again [sic], take praises and critics to heart at your own risk,” she posted on December 17, 2021.

“Just do your thing as long as you are not hurting anyone.”

Ovaioza's Post on March 2 — Ovaioza’s Post on March 2

Ovaioza littered her Facebook timeline with many self-help and motivational quotes. She was also an expert at mingling entertaining stories with platitudes to fleece her audience.

She also frequently advised her audience to apply critical thinking in their daily lives.

A PHILANTHROPIST AND GOSPEL ARTIST

In 2017, Ovaioza released a gospel song titled ‘Holy Are You Lord’ under the stage name ‘Ovai4Jesus’.

Five years later, one can no longer say whether her actions reflect her stage name any longer.

Many of her followers said Ovaioza started out on Facebook as a philanthropist. Some Twitter users have also described her as a giveaway merchant. This is because she had given out cars to people in the past.

However, this performative philanthropy did not last long, as people later realised it was a part of her strategy to draw attention to herself.

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