By Modupe Gbadeyanka
Some top multi-level marketing (MLM) leaders have been accused of supporting a Dubai-based company, Omegapro Forex and Investment Trading Company, to defraud Nigerians.
A statement signed by Dr Ope Banwo, the Coordinating Attorney of Omegapro Action Nigeria Class (OANC), a group formed by affected investors, identified Tomiwa Orunnipin, Samuel Ajibare, Leo Bonaventure and others as those who abetted the foreign firm to dupe its Nigerian victims of over N100 billion.
It was gathered that those affected include widows, retirees, high-net-worth individuals, big business people, and even young people just starting in life.
How The Fraud Was Hatched
Omegapro Forex emerged on the scene, promising Nigerians and investors in general a pathway to financial success.
The investment scheme gained popularity and trust among Nigerians and in the world, as many saw it as a ticket to financial freedom. However, little did they know that it was going to be one of the biggest investment tragedies in Nigeria’s history.
With an intricate web of deception and manipulation, alleged promoters of the scheme, including Daniel Onoja, Tomiwa Orunnipin, Samuel Ajibare, Leo Bonaventure, and several top leader MLM Diamonds, painted the image of a foolproof investment opportunity with high returns and a secure investment environment.
Alleged promoters and agents such as Grace Udenwa Udoye, Wuraola Fadairo Orunupin, Olasebikan Oladapo, Maryann Ilorah, Chinwe Ikpe, Ajibare Olushola Ebunoluwa, Dotun Fatoyinbo, Dr Afoma Nwolisa, and Matthew Ogunmodede, marketed the venture aggressively, touting its legitimacy and potential for lucrative earnings.
At that rate of marketing, investors couldn’t help but take the bait, especially as top agents and promoters in the MLM industry who carried significant influence within their networks also participated in the marketing exercise for Omegapro.
They leveraged their status, persuading thousands of investors to entrust their hard-earned money with Omegapro. Their endorsements created an illusion of credibility that typically lured in unsuspecting Nigerians.
Aside from this, they kept assuring Nigerian investors that rigorous due diligence had been conducted by them on Omegapro’s Dubai-based owners and operations, implying that it was a legitimate and low-risk investment.
This way, investors put in their entire life savings, and pensions, while some even sold their houses and properties to invest in the Omegapro ‘Forex’ trading activities.
For their services, these top promoters allegedly collected a 10 per cent commission from the Omegapro Dubai company as a finders fee from the investment of every unsuspecting investor they referred to the scheme by selling it as a forex trading company.
At the height of what has now been declared a mega scam by investors, several of these top agents and promoters like Daniel Onoja, Tomiwa Orunnipin and Bonaventure Igboanugo allegedly earned over $50,000 weekly as finders’ fee commissions from 1000s of unsuspecting Nigerians whom they kept leading to believe that Omegapro was a legit Forex Trading Company. Cumulatively, they allegedly earned over $2 million each in just a couple of years.
The Dubai company allegedly owned by known Dubai-based scammers such as Andreas Szackas, Dilawar Singh, and Mike Simms with a long history of scamming people went as far as giving the investors a back office that showed that forex trading was going on in the company. These alleged forex trading activities have since been exposed by the USA CFTC as an elaborate scam to lure in people interested in forex trading on a global level.
According to Barrister Banwo, top promoters and agents of the biggest global forex scams in history allegedly used the illegal commissions and proceeds from this Omegapro Ponzi scheme to buy huge mansions in choice places in Nigeria, Canada, the USA, and the United Kingdom leaving investors in pain.
“Daniel Onoja recently celebrated the purchase of a multi-million-dollar house in Canada, while Leo Bonaventure, recently posted videos of the housewarming of his own amazing multi-billion naira estate in Lagos. On his part, Leo Bonaventure recently obtained a micro-banking license,” Banwo said.
While the promoters of the alleged scam smiled at the bank, investors have been crying having realised that the alleged due diligence said to have been conducted was non-existent, and their funds gone.
Interestingly, an investigation has now shown that experts in forex trading had for the past three years been sounding the alarm bells that Omegapro was a scam and a Ponzi scheme.
These experts wrote articles and posted videos about Omegapro, however, these Nigerian top agents and promoters pretended they did not see any of these warning signs as they continued to promote Omegapro as a foolproof investment.
Climax Of The Scam
The pains of Omegapro’s investors began in September 2022, when Omegapro Dubai leaders, their collaborators all over the world, and Nigeria suddenly announced that its system had been hacked, and it stopped releasing payments of matured investments to investors all over the world. A few weeks later, the Dubai owners announced that they were migrating all their investors’ accounts to a new company called Brokers Domain until they could fix the breach in their system. Investors all over the world started getting nervous with some asking tough questions.
Then around April 2022, while over $1 billion of investors’ money in over 70 countries remained frozen, the owners and their top agents and collaborators announced the formation of a new company called Go Global and began aggressively recruiting Omegapro investors to invest in the new company with promises that their investments in Omegapro would soon be released.
Many investors fell for this and started promoting the new Go Global company, while others started seeing the handwriting on the wall.
Finally, in August 2023, the Omegapro owners based in Dubai, and their top promoters and agents announced that they would not be able to pay anyone’s Omegapro investment because the United States CFTC had frozen their accounts over some investigations affecting one of their partners named Mike Simms. However, they could not explain how Omegapro money could have been seized in the USA when they had earlier confirmed that the company does not have any office in the USA and did not have any license to operate direct or financial transactions in the USA.
As suspicions grew, with many investors asking for more details of this shocking announcement, Omegapro leaders abruptly closed its doors, and many of their top Nigerian agents and promoters also went underground, leaving thousands of investors all over the world, including over 250,000 Nigerian investors in despair.
The company’s Dubai-based owners, Dilawar, Singh, and Paulo, and other top agents allegedly made millions of dollars in investments from over 70 countries all over the world, including an estimated N200 billion coming from Nigerian investors.
Amidst reports of a petition to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Interpol, and a pending class action lawsuit by affected Nigerian investors in the name of Omegapro Action Nigeria, one is forced to X-ray the involvement of these agents and promoters all over the world, especially those of Omegapro agents in Nigeria who aided and abetted the Dubai company to scam their citizens.
Questions such as were they complicit in the scheme, did they knowingly promote a fraudulent venture, or were they also victims of deception, were they willing accomplices, unwitting victims, should they be made to refund the billions of Naira they received in commissions for luring unsuspecting members of the public into parting with their hard-earned money into this global scam have been asked.
Typically, some maintain that the promoters are guilty of not doing their due diligence while promoting Omegapro thus leading to the loss of thousands of Dollars.
For this sect, the ruling is simple, a refund, at the minimum, the commissions earned from the illegal forex trading scheme is a must.
Adedapo Adesanya