One thousand, four hundred and six times, a Secrets Reporters investigation was taken whole, headline, body text and photographs, and republished as the work of six websites that did no reporting at all: naijaonpoint.com, newsngr.com, newsngr.com.ng, thisday.com.ng, ngprobe.com and naijaonpoint.com.ng. A SecretsReporters census of the six websites’ own published records and registration documents incontrovertibly reveals that 495 distinct Secrets Reporters stories were stolen by at least one of the six, that 292 of those stories sit on three or more of the websites at the same time, 180 on four or more, and 69 on five or more, in a copying operation that runs on automated timers and has run, on the oldest record, since September 2025.
The taking is mechanical and it is fast. On Sunday, 25 October 2026, Secrets Reporters published five exclusives, and the network took them the same day, each site on its own fixed cadence: naijaonpoint.com republished every one of the five about ten minutes after publication, at ten minutes past each hour; newsngr.com followed in four to twenty three minutes; newsngr.com.ng in six to nineteen minutes, and on the same day it carried one Secrets Reporters story, the Federal Medical Centre Bida private account report, thirty seconds after the original appeared. thisday.com.ng took the Delta State bank balances exclusive, the Otedola exclusive and the Oritsejafor exclusive the same day, and carried the Blinqpay exclusive as the lead story on its homepage that evening. ngprobe.com took the Delta exclusive two hours and seventeen minutes after it was published.
NaijaOnPoint, at naijaonpoint.com, is the largest taker. The website carries 75,528 posts in all, and 475 of them are confirmed Secrets Reporters copies, 473 matched exactly and two more under rebuilt headlines, with copy dates running from 17 September 2025 to 25 October 2026, over a year of continuous taking. The domain itself was registered on 7 July 2012 at NameCheap and has been held in the same registration ever since.
NewsNGR, at newsngr.com, carries 28,704 posts, and 363 of them are confirmed Secrets Reporters copies, 299 matched exactly and 64 more carried under rebuilt addresses, its own name appended to some of them, with copy dates running from 7 April 2026 to 25 October 2026. The domain was registered on 16 August 2022 at NameCheap.
The Nigerian twin, newsngr.com.ng, carries 33,841 posts, and 271 addresses on it are confirmed Secrets Reporters copies, 192 matched exactly and 79 under rebuilt addresses, covering 270 distinct stories, one story taken twice under two addresses, with copy dates running from 17 June 2026 to 25 October 2026. The domain was registered in November 2020 at WhoGoHost and its registration has since moved to Truehost Cloud.
The fake ThisDay, at thisday.com.ng, carries 20,590 posts, and 148 of them are confirmed Secrets Reporters copies, with copy dates running from 25 June 2026 to 25 October 2026, and its taking on Sunday ran at thirty seven minutes for the Delta exclusive, sixty two minutes for the Otedola exclusive and ninety six minutes for the Oritsejafor exclusive. The domain was registered on 3 February 2023 at Truehost Cloud and the registration runs to 3 February 2027.
NGProbe, at ngprobe.com, is the smallest website in the network and the most concentrated: 684 posts in all, 133 of them confirmed Secrets Reporters copies, 12 matched exactly and 121 verified page by page against the originals, with copy dates running from 2 September 2026 to 25 October 2026, about one post in every five on the entire website. Seven further copies scored just under the verification threshold and are not counted. The domain was registered on 31 August 2026 at NameCheap, and the copying began two days after the registration. The only telephone number the website publishes anywhere is +30 694 425 1329.
NaijaOnPoint Nigeria, at naijaonpoint.com.ng, is the largest website in the network by volume, 90,678 posts, and the smallest taker of Secrets Reporters material, with 16 confirmed copies, copy dates running from 14 May 2026 to 2 September 2026 and none of Sunday’s five exclusives among them. The domain was registered on 25 August 2018. It is also the one website in the network whose telephone numbers fill the record: 07033668262, the number on its 2020 registration in the name imoh kingsley and still standing on its 2022 record; +44 7389673342, a United Kingdom number, standing on its current registration contacts; 0905 409 3629, the number on its business listing; and 08081021376, the number on a second listing for the brand. Across all six websites there are 250,025 posts, and the confirmed Secrets Reporters copies among them total 1,406.
For the other four websites there is no telephone number anywhere in any record. NaijaOnPoint publishes no telephone number, no email and no address at all, only the name of its operating company. NewsNGR publishes the names of its editors and an email address and no telephone number. The registration of newsngr.com.ng withholds its telephone number behind a data protection redaction that names only its Southampton registrant company. The fake ThisDay publishes one email address, [email protected], and no telephone number.
NGProbe does not only steal; it rebrands. The fourth part of the Secrets Reporters SEEPCO investigation stands on ngprobe.com word for word, except that the sentence “A SecretsReporters investigation” has been replaced with “A NGProbe investigation” and the reporter’s byline has been replaced with the name Henry Okeke. Its headlines are lightly reworded to defeat searches. The address it publishes for itself, Plot 1247, Wadata House, Aminu Kano Crescent, Wuse 2, Abuja, carries the Greek telephone number stated in its own record above.
Thisday.com.ng commits a second impersonation on top of the theft: it brands itself ThisDay, the name of the established Nigerian newspaper whose own website is thisdaylive.com, and it republishes Secrets Reporters investigations under that borrowed name, photographs re-hosted on its own server, within hours of publication.
The stolen investigations are the product being sold. Three Google AdSense accounts monetise the six websites, and the account numbers sit in the websites’ own code and advertising files: pub-1199312737896524 is an authorised direct seller on newsngr.com.ng and naijaonpoint.com.ng and its advertising code is embedded on naijaonpoint.com; pub-9233091591438470 runs on newsngr.com; pub-2753978134738000 runs on ngprobe.com. NewsNGR and the fake ThisDay also share one Google Analytics property, G-PD91RCN9WY, read in the code of both websites, and NewsNGR’s own site data names its organisation as ThisDay.com.ng. Under the Copyright Act 2022, reproducing and communicating a copyright work to the public without the owner’s licence is infringement, and doing so on a commercial scale for profit is a criminal offence; SecretsReporters holds the copyright in every one of the 495 stories, and no licence of any kind has ever been granted to any of the six websites or their operators.
The six are not six. Cloudflare issues each of its accounts its own pair of nameservers, and the six domains cluster onto three pairs: naijaonpoint.com, naijaonpoint.com.ng and newsngr.com.ng share one account; newsngr.com and ngprobe.com share a second; thisday.com.ng sits on a third pairing that it shares with timesnow.com.ng, a documented property of the same Southampton registrant named below. All three .com domains of the network are registered at NameCheap, all six websites run the identical WordPress and LiteSpeed stack behind Cloudflare, all use the same automated importer that lifts a story within minutes and re-hosts its photographs, and the same headline artefact, an “exclusive-” prefix the importer adds when it rebuilds a headline, appears independently on naijaonpoint.com and on newsngr.com. Even the mastheads carry the same hand: the fake ThisDay and NGProbe sit in different Cloudflare accounts, yet both publish under a green eagle head, the one emblem worn two ways across the divide.
Behind the websites, the names on record dissolve on inspection. NewsNGR publishes the network’s only masthead, Executive Editor Patrick Ntu, Senior Editor Dennis Abiola, Associate Editor Jimoh Mayowa and writers Frank White and Ifeanyi Chukwu, at NewsNGR Media Nigeria, 167 Adetokunbo Ademola Crescent, Wuse 2, Abuja. NaijaOnPoint says it is operated by Onpoint Tech. Ltd., while its own terms name a different party, topjams Media Enterprises, as the contracting company and claim the gossip website nggossips.com as the same company’s brand. The Benin City arm calls itself NOP Media Inc in its footer, NOP Media Limited in a business listing and plain Nop Media in its registration record, three different corporate forms for one operation. The only personal name in any registration record across the whole network is the 2020 registrant of naijaonpoint.com.ng, recorded as imoh kingsley of Benin City, Edo State, whose telephone number still stands on the site’s later records after his name was replaced by the company names. None of the seven operator names used by the network, NOP Media in its three forms, Onpoint Tech. Ltd., topjams Media Enterprises, NewsNGR Media, Naijaonpoint Media or SoftWebPro, carries a registration number, a registration date or a single director in any public record, although Onpoint Tech. Ltd. and NOP Media each claim on their own pages to be registered companies. There is no RC number anywhere for any of them.
The newsngr.com.ng registration leads out of Nigeria entirely. Its registrant of record is SoftWebPro Inc, of 25 Landguard Road, Southampton, Hampshire, England, the same name that stands as registrant over a stable of twelve Nigerian news brand domains, several of them built on the names of established media houses, including brands echoing NPR, E! Online, Times Now and PM News. SoftWebPro is named on a sister website, breakingnews.com.ng, as that site’s operator, and breakingnews.com.ng was itself registered in the name Naijaonpoint Media, tying the Southampton name to the Benin City operation. No company called SoftWebPro, in any spelling, exists on the United Kingdom companies register, live or dissolved. The Southampton address on the registration is a guest house; no record connects the guest house or the people who run it to this network, and the address stands in the record for one reason only, that the registrant chose to put it there. The same operation publishes, on breakingnews.com.ng, a contact address for SoftwebPro Limited at 28th Road, 42nd Avenue, Lekki, Lagos: no such streets exist in Lekki, and no map or directory anywhere carries the address, while 28th Road and 42nd Avenue are street names in Bayside, Queens, New York. The registration record of naijaonpoint.com.ng disagrees with the website itself about its own address, 42 Universal Street in the record, 14 Universal Street in the site’s footer, and its current contacts carry a United Kingdom telephone number over the Benin City address.
The theft is deep enough that the thieves have been mistaken for the authors. When Apostle Folorunso Alakija threatened legal action over a Secrets Reporters investigation into a $1.27 million fraud probe, an account of her threat named NGProbe among the publishers of the investigation, an investigation reported, written and published by SecretsReporters alone.
