For reporting the ongoing issues between them and their former boss to the media, Abiola Ikuseedun and Oladetoun Gabriel, former employees of Helpline Telecoms, have now received an invitation from the police for allegations bordering on crime.

The letter dated August 9 came from the office of the Divisional Police Headquarters, Alausa, Ikeja, and stated that they were to show up at the station on August 14.

Prior to receiving the police invitation, both individuals claimed to have been contacted by unfamiliar phone numbers urging them to remove a report published by FIJ concerning their former company.

The duo had earlier accused Helpline Telecoms, a telecommunications retail service based in Ibadan, of withholding their rightful salaries, outstanding payments and other benefits after their resignations.

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Ikuseedun said that Helpline Telecoms owed her N175,887 at the time she left in December 2022, while Gabriel said the company had owed him N203,663 since his resignation in February.

Ikuseedun, who worked as a marketer for Africa mama ATM Ltd., a subsidiary of Helpline Telecoms, said that a fraud was committed in her name, the details of which were strange to her.

She said the company sometime last year came up with a plan to engage a canvasser who would be registering people for daily contribution on their point of sales machine.

According to her, the role of the canvassers was to go about asking people to register with their phone numbers or migrating existing owners of their point of sale (PoS) machine on the daily contribution plan they called AjoPlus.

“We were only told to stay with the new canvasser and train them and allow them to work on their own. The mandate given to me was to recruit a canvasser,” Ikuseedun told FIJ.

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“A letter of guarantor was issued to the canvasser, so any claim of a fraudulent act in the canvasser’s operation should be levelled against the guarantor and not on me.”

For Gabriel, the company’s allegation of fraud which came up a week after he made his intention to leave the company known to them was unfounded.

The claim of fraud, according to him, bordered on the fact that many of the numbers registered for the company’s AjoPlus were either non-existent or obtained fraudulently from the owners, which he was not a part of.

“Point of sale agents were made to register prospective clients with a constant one-time password of 123456. These numbers were used for multiple registrations and different clients’ AjoPlus accounts ,which made the product lack security features,” he said.

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“The company made the canvassers use this process taught to them during their training. This created a security loop-hole in the expected enhanced security layer of online transactions before Olayiwola Sunday Opoola, the chief executive officer, revised the practices.”

He said if anyone were to be held responsible, it should neither be him nor Ikuseedun because they were not the canvassers and that they were not responsible for the poor security measures enforced by the company.

FIJ called Opoola, the CEO, but he did not respond. At press time, he had not responded to a text sent him at press time.