Olagoke Olaosebikan, a software engineer, has accused some officials of the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) of extorting N37,000 from him while trying to claim a package he had ordered from Germany.

Olaosebikan told FIJ that in February, he received a call from an employee of NIPOST asking him to come to their office located in Ketu, Lagos, to claim his item, a box guitar.

During the conversation, the employee also told him he would have to pay N37,000 before his package would be handed to him.

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“I was confused and just had to visit their office. When I got there, I was told to pay N37,000, being ’20 percent of the Value Added Tax (VAT) on the total amount of N124,500′,” the software engineer said.

“I demanded to know why I needed to pay such an amount. I also made them realise that 20 percent of the total amount mentioned was about N25,000, and not N37,000.

“All they told me was that the order was from the Nigeria Customs Service and it was not their business. They even threatened to destroy my item if I did not pay the amount they demanded.”

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Olaosebikan further said he suspected a foul play when an employee that simply identified himself as Tayo told him he would have to pay into a personal account or in cash.

“The first time I went there, they said they would give me an account number to pay into, but I refused. Later, they called a particular Mr. Toki at the customs office and asked me to beg him to see if he could help reduce the amount to about N25,000,” he said.

“I noticed something was fishy when I visited the office a second time. I told them to give me the account number but they refused. They even said they were willing to ‘help’ if I would stop being difficult.

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“I ended paying the N37,000 in cash, to them. They even told me that the package could ‘get lost’ if I refused to put an end to the back and forth. When I threatened to write a complaint letter about the fraud, they mocked me. I just had to pay because the guitar is precious to me.”

FIJ contacted NIPOST over the incident but its phone lines could not be reached. An SMS sent to one of the lines was also not responded to at press time.