Popular US-based Nigerian comedian, Williams Uchemba has debunked claims of fraud against him by another US-based Nigerian human rights activist Edafe Okporo and a United Nations envoy.
Uchemba was accused of using the UN’s name for fraud after messages of him requesting money from Mr Okporo to arrange a delegation to a UN youth event in the US went viral on Sunday.
Okporo informed UN envoy Jayathma Wickramanayake an aide to UN Secretary-General António Guterres who said Uchemba isn’t an ambassador of the organisation.
However Uchemba in a series of videos on Instagram which has been deleted disowned a Twitter account in his name as that of a known fraudster.
Uchemba said he had warned his followers in May about people impersonating him and that he did not know how to stop impersonators.
“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.
“Secondly, let me also state again that I’m the Deputy Nigerian Youth Representative, Youth Assembly at the United Nations, not ‘UN ambassador in the United Nations.’ These are different bodies. The people that organise the youth assembly are the Friendship Ambassadors Foundation,” Uchemba said.
As a result of the social media outrage, Uchemba has deleted the section where he calls himself ‘Nigerian Youth Representative Youth Assembly at the UN’ from his bio.
