On Monday, the Minister of Information, and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris announced that the United Arab Emirates had lifted its visa ban on Nigerians after diplomatic agreements with the Nigerian government. Although there is no such announcement from UAE authorities.
Soon after the announcement, Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, unveiled a website (https://documentverificationhub.ae) purportedly offering visa verification services to Nigerians on behalf of the UAE. Initially, netizens raised concerns about the seemingly exorbitant fee of around N600,000 naira for visa verification. However, an investigation by West Africa Weekly’s David Hundeyin has shown that the website is neither owned nor operated by UAE authorities.
Firstly, domain names of UAE government websites all end with the “.gov.ae” URL. But this website ends with “.ae” signalling that it is not an official UAE government website. Furthermore, unlike government-owned or operated websites, the identity of the registrar of this controversial website, according to @scamadviser, is hiding their identity by using a paid proxy.
Findings by Hundeyin show that the proxy owner of the website is one Jean Geoffrion, a Canadian who is the CTO at a Spanish IT company called Global Voice Group, which according to its website, specialises in “provision of RegTech and Govtech solutions…domestic revenue mobilisation and regulatory compliance.”
“This company also appears to only do business in Africa and in fact much of its management team is African. So in summary, we have a website with a hidden owner contracting an IT middleman who specialises in “raising sustainable revenue” through high-traffic regulatory activities (such as visa applications) to operate the website on their behalf,” Hundeyin noted.
It was also noted that the IP address of the website is hosted on an Amazon AWS server in Ireland, further proving that it is not connected in any way connected to the UAE government, which hosts all its official government websites on the Middle East (UAE) Amazon Web Services regional servers.
While some speculate that the website was set up to scam unsuspecting Nigerians, others believe that it may have been set up by a powerful private entity with links to the government, for the purpose of creating an illicit financial arbitrage opportunity from Nigerian travellers heading to the UAE.
Many hours after the Minister of Information’s announcement, the Nigerian government is yet to put out a disclaimer.
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