The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has warned Nigerians over the existence of a Twitter profile account with a similar name as that of the commission on the microblogging platform.
This comes after some news media on Tuesday reported that NIMC, via a tweet, said that those who had not linked their national identification number (NIN) with their SIM cards should be ready to face the consequences that follows.
“By order of the federal government, today is given as the last chance to register your NIMC or face the wrath of what comes next,” the tweet.
However, NIMC shared pictures of two different Twitter account pages, identifying one as the official Twitter account of the commission, while it placed a disclaimer sign on the other picture, identifying it as an “imposter” account.
The commission urged Nigerians not to send their personal information to such account.
It said: “The Twitter account @NIMC_ng is an imposter account. The official Twitter account of NIMC is @nimc_ng.
“Your NIN is your identity, avoid divulging personal information to fraudsters using parody accounts to harvest personal information of individuals”.
Meanwhile, NIMC, on January 11, 2021, had similarly warned Nigerians to adopt caution while downloading the mobile application for linking NIN with SIM cards.
It said the fake mobile NIN-SIM linkage mobile apps were harvesting people’s NIN and bank verification number (BVN) by default.
The federal government, on December 15, 2020, had placed a two-week deadline for all mobile network operators (MNOs) to provide valid NINs to update SIM registration data.
It, however, extended the deadline further to January 19, 2021 for subscribers to link their NIN with their SIM cards; while those without NIN was extended to February 9, 2021.
