Published 30th May, 2022

By Abdullah Tijani

Lupen NG, a fraudulent e-commerce automotive platform, now operates under a new company name known as Autocar NG, FIJ can report.

A source who asked not to be named told FIJ he made the discovery when he tried to seek the platform’s service in obtaining a loan for a car he wanted to purchase. He found out Autocar NG’s mode of operation was the same as Lupen NG’s.

The source told FIJ that he subsequently pretended to have registered on the platform in a bid to find out more about its operators’ new fraudulent scheme.

“I later chatted with them on WhatsApp, telling them I had registered my profile on their platform,” he said.

“As expected, they said they had sent an email to me and I should check it to find out the criteria for the car I wanted to buy.

“Even though I did not get any email because I did not register for anything, I told them I had checked and that the criteria I was given a maximum of N5 million. Then the guy told me to send the picture of the car I intended to buy.”

The source said he got the picture of a car online and sent it to Autocar NG’s representatives as requested.

“After this, they responded that they would get back to me,” he said.

“This is the same technique Lupen NG used to defraud their victims, and I want people to be aware of the risks involved in dealing with these kinds of fake companies.”

FIJ had reported how Lupen NG defrauded a banker after she approached the platform for a car loan. Lupen NG would present her with an opportunity to make the loan repayments over a period of 24 months.

After instructing her to deposit a sum of N750,000 into a Paga account, Lupen NG then stole the money and blocked her on all the platforms she could use in reaching out to them.

A further investigation conducted by FIJ on Whois, a query and response protocol widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, revealed a similarity between the email addresses used to register Lupen NG and Autocar NG.

Lupen.com.ng was registered by a user with the email address: harrison[email protected], while Autocar.com.ng was registered by 1cryptoharrison@gmail.com.

It was also discovered that the latter’s website, www.autocar.com.ng, was registered 32 days ago.

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The check on Whois also revealed that Lupen NG’s website (lupen.com.ng), registered on September 17, 2021, was scheduled to expire on September 17, 2022.

The website is however no longer accessible.

Further attempts by FIJ to confirm the existence of Autocar NG on the Company Affairs Commission’s (CAC) website yielded no result. This means Autocar NG was not registered with the commission.

“I have read a couple of reports on how Lupen NG defrauded their victims and I believe this Autocar NG is operated by the same people,” the source said.

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