• We are short Tingo Group Inc (NASDAQ:TIO) because we believe the company is an exceptionally obvious scam with completely fabricated financials.
• Tingo, headquartered in New Jersey, claims to have several business segments focused on providing mobile phones, food processing and an online food marketplace for farmers primarily located in Nigeria.
• Tingo was founded and is spearheaded by “Dozy” Mmobuosi, CEO of the key holding company entity. Dozy is regularly described by the media as a billionaire and made waves earlier this year when he attempted to acquire the now-Premier League soccer team Sheffield United.
• We’ve identified major red flags with Dozy’s background. For starters, he appears to have fabricated his biographical claim to have developed the first mobile payment app in Nigeria. We contacted the app’s actual creator, who called Dozy’s claims “a pure lie”.
• Dozy claimed to have received a PhD in rural advancement from a Malaysian university in 2007. We contacted the school to verify the degree. They wrote back saying no one by his name was found in their verification system.
• In 2017, Dozy was arrested and faced an 8-count indictment over issuance of bad checks, according to the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. He later settled the case in arbitration.
• In 2019, Dozy claimed to have launched “Tingo Airlines” and posted social media messages encouraging customers to “fly with Tingo Airlines today”. Media outlets later uncovered that Tingo had photoshopped its logo onto pictures of airplanes. Dozy later admitted to never owning any actual aircraft.
• In April 2023, Tingo’s Co-Chairman wrote a public letter to Dozy, filed with the SEC, saying he could not approve the company’s annual report and felt it “necessary to recuse myself by resigning” due to “many critical questions, comments and recommendations” that went “unanswered and unheeded”.
• Tingo’s food division is 7 months old, yet claimed to generate $577.2 million in revenue last quarter alone, representing 68% of total reported revenue. If accurate, its claimed 24.8% operating margins would exceed those of every major comparable food company.
• Yet, Tingo has no food processing facility of its own. Rather, it claims its explosive revenue and profitability is derived from acting as a middleman between Nigerian farmers and an unnamed third-party food processor.
• In February 2023, the company held a groundbreaking ceremony for a planned $1.6 billion Nigerian food processing facility of its own, attended by the country’s agriculture minister and other political luminaries.
• We found that the rendering of the planned facility, featured in Tingo’s investor materials and on a billboard at the ceremony, is actually a rendering of an oil refinery from a stock photo website.
• Following its groundbreaking, Tingo reported in a May 2023 SEC filing that it made “significant progress” on the facility, including laying “the foundations of its numerous buildings”.
• We visited the site a week later and found zero signs of progress; it was empty except for the plaque and billboard commemorating the groundbreaking ceremony, surrounded by weeds.
• Subsequent to the “groundbreaking”, Tingo announced a $150 million agreement with a UK entity called Evtec Energy to build solar panels for its non-existent food processing facility. Funding for the deal is slated to be provided through Evtec, but UK filings show that Evtec was “Dormant” as of its most recent annual report and held zero cash in the bank.
• Tingo Group bought Tingo Foods from Dozy in February 2023 for $204 million, a price “approximately equal to the cost value of the inventory held by Tingo Foods”.
• The inventory, which was reported in year-end financials, completely vanished from Tingo’s Q1 2023 accounts without explanation. In our experience, $204 million in inventory doesn’t just disappear at companies with internal controls and genuine financial reporting.
• Tingo claimed in its reverse merger press release that members of 2 unnamed farming cooperatives supply the majority of its then-9.3 million userbase, consisting of local Nigerian farmers. These farmers supposedly form the core of the company’s phone customers and provide the agricultural products used in Tingo’s food processing and trading businesses.
• A local media outlet identified and contacted the cooperatives. Both said they had never heard of Tingo and had fewer than 100 farmers in each cooperative.
• We were able to make contact with one of the cooperatives. Its owner reiterated having no relationship with Tingo and flat out told us “they are scammers”.
• Tingo claimed its mobile handset leasing, call and data segments generated $128 million in revenue last quarter (~15% of total), claiming these services are provided through an agreement with Airtel in Nigeria. The type of license they claim did not exist until June, 2023.
• Our checks with the Nigerian Communications Commission showed it has no record of Tingo being a mobile licensee at all, despite company claims of having 12 million mobile customers.
• Despite claiming to have millions of farmers using its phones, Tingo Mobile’s corporate presentation and webpage uses stock photos of farmers using phones.
• We visited Tingo Mobile’s office in Nigeria and found only a handful of employees and a sign posted on its door by federal tax authorities stating that the company is delinquent on its tax obligations.
• Tingo Mobile claimed a Ghana expansion effort would enroll 2-4 million members by February 2023. This would represent ~9%-18% market share in the country within months of launch. We found zero records pertaining to Tingo Mobile through Ghana’s communication regulator.
• We tried to contact Tingo’s Ghana support in late May to buy a phone. The email bounced back and no one picked up the phone despite numerous attempts.
• We visited Tingo’s Ghana office location in late May 2023. We saw 2 cars in the parking lot and no customers. When we tried to enroll in a plan and buy a phone we were told the location wasn’t operational yet.
• TingoPay (part of Tingo Mobile) claimed in 2021 to have launched a partnership with a major local bank.
• Two days after Tingo’s blockbuster announcement, the bank put out a statement calling Tingo’s claim false and that it had “NOT concluded any agreement with Tingo International in respect of any payment system whatsoever”.
• Tingo now claims its payment group has a point of sale (PoS) system and other merchant products. We found that pictures of Tingo’s claimed PoS system were taken from a different PoS operator’s website, with a Tingo logo photoshopped over them.
• Tingo claims its “seed to sale” online marketplace called NWASSA generated $125.3 million in revenue last quarter or ~15% of its total revenue, yet the website has been “under maintenance” and inoperable for months.
• Tingo claims it has launched its NWASSA platform in Ghana. The Ghana website also doesn’t work and just says “Updating…” without ever going anywhere.
• In a May 2023 press release, Tingo claimed its brand-new agricultural export business, Tingo DMCC, was on track to deliver over U.S. $1.34 billion in exports by Q3.
• Tingo’s sales projections for that business are higher than the entire nation of Nigeria’s annual 2022 agricultural exports, which totaled about U.S. $1.15 billion, per government data.
• Despite Tingo’s bold claims, we found no import/export records from Tingo at all through searches of Nigerian customs and trading databases.
• Tingo DMCC’s website has numerous non-functioning links and includes a fake testimonial that appears leftover from the website template.
• Tingo’s financial statements are riddled with errors and typos, including a note to itself that it apparently forgot to delete, saying “please update for the tingle (sic) transaction including the tingle (sic) foods transaction”.
• Its financials include other basic errors like incorrect math and leaving zeroes off key metrics.
• More troublingly, Tingo’s cash flow and balance sheet statements do not reconcile and show major errors indicating a complete lack of financial controls. Its cash flow statements regularly subtract items from cash that should be added and vice versa.
• The errors also seem to apply to Tingo’s audited annual financial statements, which were recently given an unqualified audit opinion by Deloitte Israel (a strange choice given the company lacks substantive operations in Israel).
• We strongly suspect Tingo’s cash balance, which it conveniently claims is held in Nigeria, is fake. The company collected only ~12% of the interest income one would expect from its claimed cash balances.
• Overall, we think Tingo is a worthless and brazen fraud that should serve as a humiliating embarrassment for all involved. We do not expect the company will be long for this world.

Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we have taken a short position in shares of Tingo Group Inc (NASDAQ:TIO). This report represents our opinion, and we encourage every reader to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.

Introduction And Basics On The Business

Tingo Group (NASDAQ:TIO) is a holding company that claims to operate primarily in Nigeria in multiple business segments, including (i) food processing and sales (ii) mobile handset sales & leasing and (iii) an online food marketplace called “Nwassa”. The company has a fully diluted market capitalization of ~$1.5 billion as of this writing, with a recent peak market value of ~$3 billion as of May 22^nd, 2023.[1]

The company first went public in August 2021 on the OTC market through a reverse merger with a Thai company that originally intended to acquire a third-tier crypto exchange.

In December 2022, the company entered the Nasdaq by closing another reverse merger with a listed Chinese fintech company. The company was renamed Tingo Group Inc and the ticker changed from MICT to TIO on February 27, 2023.

Tingo was founded in 2001 in Nigeria by “Dozy” Mmobuosi, who currently serves as the CEO of Tingo Group Holdings, the group’s key holding company entity.[2] He has gained international attention, gracing the cover of GQ Africa in December 2022.

Regularly described by media as a billionaire, Dozy made further waves in February 2023 when he attempted to buy Sheffield United, an English football team recently promoted to the Premier league. [1,2,3,4] The deal stalled over questions about whether Dozy’s financial resources were genuine.