UK Nigerians Squeezed For N588,000 After Biometric Fraud!

​The digital transformation promises of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) have hit a wall of frustration for citizens in the United Kingdom, where passport applicants report being trapped in a loop of technical failures, repeated biometric demands, and heavy financial extortions.

​Ebenezer Omejalile, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of the Advocates for Children & Vulnerable Persons Network (ACVPN), detailed his ordeal after attempting to navigate the controversial contactless passport renewal system. Having already paid an initial £230 (approximately N412,000) for his passport renewal, Omejalile was confronted with additional billing demands totaling £98, broken down into a £78 charge for biometric verification via the newly introduced mobile application and a supplementary £20 fee.

​Despite successfully completing facial recognition routines and finger scans on a fully compliant mobile device—where the system accurately cross-referenced his live capture with data and images from his expiring passport—the application abruptly crashed, logged him out, and declared him “ineligible” without a recourse link.

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​”If this app could capture my face and bring down my previous pictures and confirm it 100%, what’s wrong with my fingerprint?” Omejalile questioned during a media appearance, noting that applicants are routinely set up for failure by an algorithm that funnels them back to physical attendance portals.

​This technical breakdown mirrors broader administrative bottlenecks at the Nigeria High Commission in London. Whistleblowers within the mission have alleged that ongoing special passport intervention exercises are plagued by systemic corruption, including the black-market trading of appointment slots. While capacity limits for daily interventions are officially capped at 90 applicants to ensure seamless processing, insiders claim numbers are routinely inflated past 300, creating chaotic scenes, severe overcrowding, and mounting ancillary costs for stranded nationals.

​The compounding effect of software glitches on the NIS contactless platform and alleged manual manipulation of appointment schedules has left many diaspora Nigerians paying upward of N588,000 for a single renewal cycle, undercutting the federal government’s ease-of-service mandates.