Published 22nd Mar, 2023

By Emmanuel Uti

When Tolulope Ojo, a resident of Osun State, paid N35,000 for an iPhone 6 to Efrinty Phone Company on February 5, 2021, little did he know he would be scammed.

Ojo told FIJ that he continued to hope that Efrinty Phone Company would send his phone to him until they didn’t.

The Osun resident said he found the Efrinty page on Facebook advertising the various smartphones they claimed to have, of which an iPhone on their shelf caught his fancy.

He immediately sent a direct message to the page, making proper inquiries on how he could purchase a phone from the supposed company.

“After I sent them a direct message, they asked me to chat with their customer care number on WhatsApp. After chatting with the customer, he asked me to send the money to a Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) account,” Ojo told FIJ.

He said that immediately after he sent the money, a strange caller identified himself as the dispatch rider to deliver the phone to him.

“They asked me to pay the dispatcher, but when I called him, he declined my calls. On reaching out to Efrinty, I realised they had blocked me everywhere,” he said.

He said he tried everything he could to contact the company, but to no avail. Instead, he realised he had been scammed.

The scammer had introduced himself to Ojo as ‘Joseph’, a name that matches the name of the GTB account number that received the money.

When this reporter contacted the scammer as a prospective customer, he asked him to send him a message on WhatsApp. But when this reporter messaged him, he did not respond.

Minutes later, this reporter called Joseph on another line and introduced himself as a reporter with FIJ, but he went mute.

On Facebook, FIJ found that the last post by Efrinty Phone Company was on November 2, 2021, but three other pages, including one posing as the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), were still publishing posts about Efrinty.

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