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Claim: A Facebook page shares that UBA is offering business loans.
Verdict: Misleading! There is no link to the verified UBA page. The official website does not show such information, and red flags were discovered from talking with the agents.
Full Text
Financial institutions, like the United Bank For Africa (UBA), give out loans to their customers to help them. In this regard, scammers also are always on the lookout for unsuspecting customers to rip them off their hard-earned money.
A Facebook page, Uba Easy Loan Foundation Services Nigeria, posted that they are giving out loans to all UBA customers ranging from 10,000 naira to one million naira.
“We are delighted to announce that all UBA Bank Customers are eligible for a float loan ranging from 10,000 to 1,000,000. Businesses loans of up to a million naira. Need loan? Send a direct message now! Don’t be afraid or scared to provide your necessary details for your loan registrations, we are here to guide you all in other not to fall as victim to scammers and lose your hard earned money, (NEED LOAN)kindly send us a direct message now.” the post reads.
In the comment section, different people kept indicating interest in the loan application. The Facebook page had different loan posts and other pages, so we decided to verify the posts’ authenticity.
Verification
We contacted the page to talk to them about getting a loan and noticed some red flags during the conversation.
The user asked that we share our account number and phone number, the last four digits of the atm card, the debit card pin, the expiry card date, and the one-time password(OTP) that will be sent to the phone number.
Should OTP be sent to people?
So, we spoke to a UBA bank staff member, Seyi, who mentioned that getting a loan from a bank should not require giving out sensitive information like card details and OTP.
“No staff will ever ask you for your card details. It is personal information. If someone asks, know that they are out to scam you. Confirm from your account officer first before trusting someone on the internet, no matter the name they use.”
Other red flags
During our discussion with the agent, we noticed the unprofessional writing style, for example, repetition of words and grammatical errors.
We ran a Google Advance Search on the name of the Facebook page. We saw variants of the different pages like accounts Uba Easy Loan Foundation Services Nigeria, Uba Easy Loan Foundation Services, Uba Easy Loan Foundation Services Nigeria, Uba Loan, and Uba Easy Loan Foundation Services Nigeria. This makes it fake. The original site for requesting a loan is on the bank’s website.
The official page for getting verified information, UBA Group, did not call for collecting loans on their page, making the original post fake.
Conclusion
Scammers are always out to get people, especially during festive seasons. People should talk to their account officers about sensitive issues. Based on our investigation, we saw that the page is fake and fraudulent.
