Aeroland Travels Nigeria Limited has petitioned the Inspector General of Police Kayode Egbetokun to investigate Lufthansa Airline, which allegedly sold tickets online using its identity and passcode and consequently, defrauded it of US$333,350.53 ticket sales.
In the said petition written by the legal counsel of Aeroland Travels Dennis E. Omorojor, Esq. Managing Partner DENNIS OMOROJOR & ASSOCIATES cited that the fraudulent sales signal a complicit connivance on the part of Lufthansa Airline, as its efforts to cancel the unauthorised ticket sales when discovered, were clearly hampered.
According to the lawyer some local and foreign travel agents connived with Lufthansa Airlines in what appears to be an act of economic sabotage to defraud Aeroland Travels via online ticket sales, citing a level of compromise of existing security measures which ought to protect such transactions from ‘hackers’.
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The petition read in parts, “Aeroland Travels a respected IATA licensed travel agent of over 30 years, we noticed an unusually high volume of debits to our IATA Remittance Holding Capacity (RHC) Account which were not reflected in our records of ticket sales for the period in between July to September 2025. This raised a suspicion of fraudulent ticket sales on our agency account.
“We immediately notified and requested a billing schedule from IATA which showed that all the abnormally high-volume sales debited to our account are Lufthansa Airline tickets in various part of the world which did not tally with our records.
“Upon contacting Lufthansa to explain the basis of the unauthorized ticket sales using our agency identity and passcode, Lufthansa responded that the fraudulent ticket sales were done through access to Lufthansa’s SPARK ticketing platform which we had not used since 2023.
“Lufthansa had provided an alternative ticketing platform called NDC managed by VERTEIL which we have been using to issue tickets since 2023.
“Hitherto a total of US$333,350.53 has been debited to and collected from Aeroland Travels via the IATA ticket payment system and we believe that a thorough investigation would reveal more fraudulent ticket sales which Lufthansa may be concealing having blocked our access to all ticketing platforms thus also preventing the consequential cancellation of the unused fraudulent tickets.
“Upon examination of the schedule of fraudulent ticket sales, it was discovered that two Nigerians; namely, Balogun Olumide and Ismaila Babatunde Ibrahim are also involved in the fraudulent ticket sales, but claimed that they booked the tickets online from a foreign travel agent.
“We then reported this monumental fraud to the police and IATA, both of whom requested Lufthansa to provide the Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses from which Lufthansa’s SPARK ticketing platform was accessed for the unauthorized issuance of the respective tickets in order to track down the fraudsters.
“Lufthansa has refused to provide the IP Address and/or its systems data for examination to determine how the tickets were fraudulently sold, a refusal we believe is to conceal their culpability in the fraud.”
Also, Aeroland Travels alleged that officers of Lufthansa (Mr. John Opara and Juliana Nwabueze) called to threaten it to withdraw its legitimate complaint to IATA and the police in a bid to cover their culpability in the fraud and went ahead to block access preventing them from managing Lufthansa flight ticket/schedules of our customers, leading to more losses.
The travel agency however, urged the IGP to carry out a thorough investigation of the fraudulent Lufthansa ticket sales using its account identity and passcode for the purpose of recovering the funds and bringing the culprits and their accomplices to justice.
A Lufthansa Airline official contacted by Sunrise News on the matter, refused speaking with to the media, “I don’t want to speak with the press”, she said and ended the call abruptly.
Following the development, the Interpol have been alerted and investigation is ongoing to unravel the culprit that perpetrated the criminal act.