With N100, information of Nigerians can be accessed via their NIN and BVN through a website anyverify.com.ng. This raises serious privacy and identity theft concerns as the website doesn’t have any feature showing it belongs to the Nigerian authorities in charge of identity management.
The National Identification Number (NIN) and Bank Verification Number (BVN) are part of Nigerians’ means of transactions for business, official, international and local purposes. This information are private and are not meant to be ‘easily’ accessed by anyone except on demand by security operatives for safety reasons.
As observed by our correspondent, any verify.com.ng shows that to access any information, a user needs to login (if they already have an existing account) or register.
To register, the user inputs an email to which a code would be sent as part of registration, and on the next page of the registration, the code and other information of the user are demanded.
The unauthorised website bragging to hold and provide access to sensitive personal and financial data of Nigerian citizens claims it “provides exceptional services that suit all your needs pertaining to verification services. Millions of customers stick to AnyVerify because of high reliability, lowest cost, and excellent support.”
“We provide millions of our users reliable and quickest services to verify people’s identity using their NIN, BVN, International Passport, Driving License, Voter’s Card and do much more,” we site boasts.
The Foundation for Investigative Journalism had in March revealed XpressVerify, a private website commercializing identification data of Nigerian citizens by trading BVNs, and other sensitive information.
The Paradigm Initiative, a non-government organization providing social issues and advocacy, also raised an alarm and called on the Federal Government of the fraudulent and unapproved website from the government agencies database.
It stated that the website AnyVerify.com.ng is into the commercialization and distribution of personal and private data of Nigerians as low as N100.