The Phantom Empire

How Dozy Mmobuosi built a billion-dollar agritech company out of nothing at all—and what it reveals about the fragility of financial due diligence.

On the morning of June 6, 2023, investors in Tingo Group awoke to discover that they owned shares in what appeared to be an elaborate fiction. Hindenburg Research, the short-selling firm that had previously exposed problems at Nikola and the Adani Group, published a report with a title that dispensed with euphemism: “Tingo Group: Fake Farmers, Phones, and Financials—The Nigerian Empire That Isn’t.” The company, Hindenburg concluded, was “an exceptionally obvious scam with completely fabricated financials.”

By the close of trading, Tingo’s stock had collapsed by forty-eight percent, erasing $145 million in market capitalization. Within months, the Securities and Exchange Commission would halt trading entirely, federal prosecutors would unseal a criminal indictment, and the company’s founder—a Nigerian entrepreneur named Dozy Mmobuosi who had, until recently, been attempting to purchase an English Premier League football club—would become a fugitive.

The Tingo affair is, at one level, a straightforward story of alleged fraud: a charismatic executive, fabricated financial statements, credulous investors. But it is also something more unsettling—a case study in how the machinery of modern finance, with its auditors and stock exchanges and regulatory filings, can be made to bless fictions so transparent that, in retrospect, one wonders how anyone believed them at all.

Mmobuosi’s biography, as presented to investors, traced an inspiring arc. Born in Lagos in 1978, he claimed degrees from Ambrose Alli University and a doctorate from the University of Putra Malaysia. In 2001, he founded Tingo Mobile, a company that purported to provide mobile technology and fintech solutions to rural Nigerian farmers. The pitch was irresistible: by equipping subsistence farmers with smartphones and connecting them to digital marketplaces, Tingo would modernize African agriculture while generating substantial profits for shareholders. It was impact investing with extraordinary returns.

The numbers, as reported in SEC filings, were remarkable. Tingo Mobile claimed approximately 9.3 million subscribers—Nigerian farmers who leased Tingo-branded smartphones and used the company’s Nwassa platform to sell their produce. The platform reportedly processed a billion dollars in gross transaction value monthly. In 2022, the company claimed revenues approaching $1.2 billion and cash reserves exceeding $460 million.

These figures made Tingo an attractive acquisition target. In December 2022, MICT, a struggling NASDAQ-listed company that had reported net losses exceeding $37 million the previous year, completed a merger with Tingo Mobile. The combined entity, rechristened Tingo Group, promised investors “substantial earnings” and “material quarter over quarter growth.” Mmobuosi, who controlled Tingo Mobile, became the dominant figure in the merged company.

Two months later, Tingo acquired another Mmobuosi creation: Tingo Foods, a food processing business that had allegedly generated over $400 million in revenue during its first four months of existence. In exchange, Mmobuosi received a promissory note for $204 million. The company announced plans to construct a $1.6 billion “state-of-the-art” food processing facility in Nigeria’s Delta State, complete with a $150 million solar plant to be built by a British partner called Evtec Energy.

Analysts were enthusiastic. Taglich Brothers projected that Tingo’s revenues could reach $5.9 billion by 2024. The stock, which had traded below a dollar before the merger, climbed to $5.32 by May 2023. Mmobuosi, meanwhile, was making headlines in the British press for his attempted £90 million takeover of Sheffield United Football Club.

The problems, when investigators began looking, proved to be comprehensive.

Hindenburg’s researchers traveled to Nigeria and discovered that the farming cooperatives supposedly comprising Tingo Mobile’s 9.3 million subscribers denied ever having heard of the company. One cooperative, the Ailoje Royal Farms, which Tingo claimed accounted for 4.844 million customers, told investigators it had fewer than one hundred farmers total. “We never heard of Tingo,” a representative said, “nor did we have millions of farmers under our organization.”

The company’s claimed suppliers were equally elusive. Tingo’s SEC filings identified UGC Technologies and Bullitt Mobile as the “sole suppliers of mobile phones” for its operations. When Hindenburg contacted UGC’s CEO, he confirmed that his company had bid on a Tingo contract years earlier but “never heard back.” Bullitt acknowledged signing a contract to supply phones in the future but confirmed it had never actually delivered any. The SEC would later conclude that Tingo had never received “a single phone from either supplier.”

The Nwassa platform, supposedly processing a billion dollars monthly, appeared to be barely functional. Its website had been “under maintenance” for months. Archives revealed a handful of product listings with no reviews or ratings—hardly the infrastructure for hundreds of millions in agricultural transactions.

As for Tingo Foods’ $1.6 billion processing facility, Hindenburg investigators visited the site three months after a groundbreaking ceremony and found “zero signs of progress; it was empty except for the plaque and billboard commemorating the groundbreaking ceremony, surrounded by weeds.” The rendering of the facility that Tingo had presented to investors turned out to be a stock image of an oil refinery, available for purchase online for $299. Evtec Energy, the supposed joint venture partner, was a dormant company with no cash on hand.

The most damning evidence concerned the financial statements themselves. According to the SEC’s subsequent complaint, Tingo’s 2022 annual report claimed a cash balance of $461.7 million in its Nigerian bank accounts. Authentic bank records for the same accounts showed a balance of less than fifty dollars.

The discrepancy was not a rounding error. It was a fabrication of virtually the entire sum.

The SEC’s seventy-two-page complaint, filed in December 2023, alleged that Mmobuosi had created “fake bank statements, falsified general ledgers, and other forged and doctored documents” and submitted them to auditors. The fraud, prosecutors said, dated to at least 2019, when Mmobuosi allegedly created fake financial statements portraying Tingo Mobile as “a thriving and profitable enterprise with hundreds of millions of annual revenue, profit and available cash.” In reality, the company “had no meaningful operations or customers and about $15 in its bank account.”

The mechanics of the deception were brazen. According to investigators, Mmobuosi and his associates purchased domain names mimicking those of suppliers and customers, then used email addresses from these domains to send auditors fake confirmations of business relationships. Fictitious bank statements showed payments from farming cooperatives that actual bank records confirmed had never occurred. The company claimed millions in revenue from its Paystack payment gateway; authentic records showed no such payments had ever been received.

Tingo Foods, acquired in February 2023, replicated the pattern. The company provided auditors with bank statements showing $556 million in deposits during its first four months of operations. The SEC discovered that Tingo Foods had not even opened a bank account until February 2023—after the period covered by those statements. Its actual balance thereafter: approximately one hundred dollars.

The numbers involved are almost comically large. The SEC’s analysis found that Tingo Mobile’s fictitious bank statements overstated its 2022 closing balance by a factor of more than fifteen million—1,550,455,495 percent, to be precise. This was not sophisticated accounting manipulation. It was the wholesale invention of a business.

Federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal indictment in January 2024, charging Mmobuosi with securities fraud, false SEC filings, and conspiracy. The charges carry a maximum sentence of forty-five years. Mmobuosi, who had retreated to Nigeria, issued a statement calling the allegations “unfounded” and claiming he was “preparing to contest them to the full extent of his capacity.” He has not appeared in court. The Department of Justice describes him as “at large.”

In September 2024, a federal judge in Manhattan entered a default judgment against Mmobuosi and his companies, ordering them to pay $250 million in disgorgement and penalties. The $204 million promissory note Mmobuosi had received for Tingo Foods was ordered cancelled. His shares in the company were voided. He was permanently barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company and prohibited from participating in the securities markets.

By then, Tingo Group had ceased operations. Its website was offered for sale. Contractors reported they had not been paid since the previous December. The company’s auditor, Deloitte Israel, resigned, stating it could “no longer rely on management’s representations” and was “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management.”

What makes the Tingo case remarkable is not the audacity of the alleged fraud but the failure of every institutional safeguard to detect it.

Begin with the auditors. Deloitte gave Tingo an unqualified opinion on its 2022 financial statements—the same statements that claimed $461 million in cash when the actual balance was under fifty dollars. The SEC subsequently brought charges against a Nigerian auditor, Olayinka Temitope Oyebola, who allegedly discovered that Tingo executives had fabricated audit reports bearing his forged signature. Rather than report the fraud, the SEC alleged, Oyebola helped conceal it by making “material misstatements to a subsequent auditor.”

Then there is NASDAQ, which listed Tingo shares and thereby conferred upon the company the imprimatur of a major American exchange. Stock exchanges are supposed to maintain listing standards that weed out companies with questionable financials. Tingo’s financials were not merely questionable; they were, allegedly, fiction.

The SEC itself had access to Tingo’s filings for years before taking action. It was a short-seller with a financial interest in the company’s decline—not a regulator with a statutory duty to protect investors—that finally exposed the alleged fraud.

And then there are the investors, including institutional funds that conducted due diligence and concluded that Tingo was a sound investment. What did that diligence consist of? Presumably it involved reviewing SEC filings that contained fabricated numbers, examining audited financial statements that were based on forged documents, and assessing a business model whose central claims—millions of farmer subscribers, billions in transaction volume—were never independently verified.

Hindenburg’s investigators flew to Nigeria and asked questions. They contacted the farming cooperatives listed as Tingo’s primary customers. They visited the site of the planned food processing facility. They searched customs databases for evidence of the export transactions Tingo claimed to be processing. In each case, they found nothing—or, more precisely, they found the absence of what Tingo claimed existed.

This was not forensic accounting. It was basic journalism: calling people, visiting places, checking whether assertions matched observable reality. The fact that a short-seller conducted this investigation, while auditors, exchanges, and regulators did not, raises uncomfortable questions about what “due diligence” actually means in contemporary finance.

Mmobuosi, for his part, has not vanished entirely. In February 2025—more than a year after his criminal indictment—he announced the launch of TingoGPT, an AI-powered agricultural platform, and Tingo AI Radio, a Lagos-based station. His capacity for reinvention appears undimmed by legal difficulties.

Whether he will ever face American justice remains uncertain. Nigeria has no extradition treaty with the United States, and Mmobuosi appears to retain sufficient resources and connections to operate publicly in his home country. The $250 million judgment against him may prove uncollectible. The investors who lost money when Tingo’s stock collapsed have filed a class action lawsuit, but recovering damages from a fugitive defendant presents obvious challenges.

What remains is a cautionary tale about the architecture of trust in financial markets. Companies seeking access to American capital must file audited financial statements with the SEC. Those statements are prepared according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and reviewed by certified public accountants. The companies’ shares trade on exchanges that maintain listing standards. Analysts at respectable firms publish research reports. The entire apparatus is designed to assure investors that the numbers they see bear some relationship to reality.

In the Tingo case, allegedly, none of it worked. A man claimed to have built a billion-dollar company serving millions of African farmers. The farmers did not exist. The revenues did not exist. The cash did not exist. The food processing facility did not exist. And yet the stock traded on NASDAQ, the financial statements received clean audit opinions, and investors committed real money on the strength of fabrications that, in hindsight, required only the most elementary verification to expose.

The SEC’s complaint describes the scale of the alleged fraud as “staggering.” The word is apt, though perhaps not for the reasons the Commission intended. What staggers is not merely the size of the invented numbers but the ease with which they were invented—and the failure of an entire ecosystem of supposed watchdogs to notice that the emperor had no clothes.

Due diligence, in the end, is not a checklist. It is not a matter of confirming that filings have been made, that auditors have opined, that boxes have been ticked. It is the willingness to ask a simple, uncomfortable question and to pursue the answer wherever it leads: Is any of this actually real?

In the case of Tingo Group, the answer appears to have been no. The farmers were phantoms. The revenues were fiction. The billions were nothing at all.

Someone should have asked.

Robert Nogacki

Founder and Managing Partner of Skarbiec Law Firm, recognized by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna as one of the best tax advisory firms in Poland (2023, 2024). Legal advisor with 19 years of experience, serving Forbes-listed entrepreneurs and innovative start-ups. One of the most frequently quoted experts on commercial and tax law in the Polish media, regularly publishing in Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Author of the publication “AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto. Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator” and co-author of the award-winning book “Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy” (Security of a Modern Company). LinkedIn profile: 18 500 followers, 4 million views per year. Awards: 4-time winner of the European Medal, Golden Statuette of the Polish Business Leader, title of “International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.” He specializes in strategic legal consulting, tax planning, and crisis management for business.