Nollywood actor and Instagram comedian Williams Uchemba, who had posed as Nigeria’s youth ambassador to the United Nations (UN), has denied fraud allegation levelled against him.
Concise News had reported earlier that the development came to the fore when Edafe Okporo, a United States-based Nigerian human rights activist, shared a screenshot of a supposed chat thread with the ex-child actor requesting information on how to attend an upcoming UN Youth Assembly event.
Read ALso: Scammers: Actor Williams Uchemba Busted Of Fraud With UN ‘Connection’ – Edafe Okporo
Responding to the request, Uchemba wrote: “I will need three things from you: passport data page, email address and registration fee ($1,000). After payment is confirmed, I will then send you a questionnaire for you to fill and send back.”
Displeased with the transaction, Okporo contacted the UN Youth Envoy, Jayathma Wickramanayake, who is an aide to the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, who then confirmed that Unchemba was unknown to the organisation.
Wickramanayake said she was working on a message “to save young people from scams like these.”
Moments after the news broke, the Instagram comedian took to the social media network to clear the air on the issue.
“First of all, I have said it tons of times, ‘Be careful with scammers.’ I have posted a lot of pictures of people using my name to defraud people. I have reported a lot of accounts. As a matter of fact, there is a guy on Twitter. I’m not on Twitter; I have never had a Twitter account. He has 15,000 followers posing to be me. His name is Williams Uchemba and a lot of people he has defrauded have called me to say, ‘There is somebody using that (name)’ and I don’t know what to do about that,” Uchemba said in one of the videos he posted on Instagram.
