techcabal/
Idorenyin Obong, a contract Android Engineer at Paystack was returning home on Thursday night in an Uber after a hard day’s work. What was supposed to be a routine journey from mainland Ikeja to Lekki became a torturous ordeal when his ride was flagged down by four officers of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) unit of the Nigerian Police for a stop and search in Victoria Island.
An officer began searching the car and upon discovering he had a MacBook and an iPhone XS in his possession, surmised that he was into ‘games’, apparently an in-house slang for internet fraud.
Obong says the officers ordered him to unlock his phone, and went through his emails, WhatsApp texts and Google Hangout and began interrogating him.
“I told him where I worked and showed him my ID card,” Obong told TechCabal.
But none of this mattered to the officers who seized his phone and ordered him into their bus. All of this was happening at 11 pm.
Obong says the officers demanded an N800,000 ransom before he could be released. He told them he did not have that much and reached an N100,000 bargain.
“They said if I didn’t give them the money, they would deal with me and shoot me.”
Obong says the officers drove him in an unnumbered and unofficial patrol bus, from Victoria Island to Marina, a 16km journey, to five ATM outlets before arriving at one where he withdrew N50,000 cash to coerce them into accepting a bank transfer for record purposes. They refused, asking him to transfer the balance into the account of an earlier victim before dropping him off in an unfamiliar area around Marina from where he had to find his way home.
Shaken, Obong says he made his way home and reckons the situation was exacerbated by the fact the officers caught his Uber driver with weed.
“Another thing that worsened the situation was the [Uber] driver was caught with weed. So that looked like a double offence on my part,” Obong said.
“I reported this to Uber so they can punish the driver because that was very very irresponsible. He was part of the cause of this mess.”
This development comes just after the #StopRobbingUs movement launched to combat the alleged harassment of tech industry employees at the hands of this dreaded police unit.
Last week, a tweet from Toni Astro, a Lagos-based software engineer, detailing his harassment experience caused the tech community to spring into action. Today, the officers who harassed and extorted the engineer have been arrested and remanded while Astro has been assured the money the officers extorted would be refunded in full.
On September 28, Astro said he was on his way home when he was accosted by SARS officers in the Ketu area of Lagos Mainland who demanded he follow them to their station for no discernible reason. Astro said one of the officers threatened to shoot him in the leg if he did not comply.
They asked for a million naira in exchange for his freedom.
At their Ogudu Area H office, Astro says he was physically assaulted in the hopes that he would confess to being an internet fraudster when they discovered he had a laptop with him. In between slaps and punches, they haggled over his ransom. After an hour, he was forced to go to the nearest ATM where he withdrew half the money in his account before he was handed his computer and other belongings and asked to go.
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