Car theft is a serious issue in Nigeria. It is speculated that more than one thousand cars get stolen in Nigeria every year. Meanwhile, a higher percentage of these cars end up in the hands of innocent car buyers who have no clue that these cars are stolen. And most often than not, these cars are never recovered by their owners.

However, little progress has been made to help victims recover their missing vehicles and to help prospective car buyers recognise a legit car from a stolen car. Buoyed by this dilemma, legitcar.ng was born.

legitcar.ng is an App that makes it impossible to buy or sell stolen cars in Nigeria. LegitCar CEO, Mr Vincent Okeke, spoke with Autosage Nigeria on what motivated him to start LegitCar.ng and the challenges and progress so far.

Here is the conversation:

Can we meet you, sir? Tell us a little about yourself.

ANS: My name is Vincent Okeke, I am the Co-founder and CEO of LegitCar Enterprise.

What is Legitcar.ng all about?

ANS: LegitCar aims to solve the problem of vehicle theft in Nigeria by providing automated vehicles theft-status check for individuals and businesses. The ultimate aim of this service is to ensure that stolen vehicles cannot be successfully resold to innocent car buyers, or used successfully by someone else; thus we work to intercept these stolen vehicles at the point of resale, maintenance, etc. serving as an effective vehicle-theft deterrent, and making our communities and country a safer place to live in and do business.

When did you start Legitcar.ng and why?

ANS: Sometime in 2016 I wanted to buy a used car; I saw a car I liked, the price was fantastic, but there was no way for me to be sure the vehicle was not stolen from someone else. Having heard stories of people losing their money and getting into trouble for mistakenly buying stolen vehicles, it was not a situation I would like to get into. I saw that gap, talked to my developer friends, Samuel Ogbujimma and Inimfon Ukpong (who are also Co-founders), we sat and brainstormed a couple of times, and LegitCar was born.

Between September 2016 to July 2017 we did a lot of research around this problem, developed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), opened our web application to the public to use free of charge, and about three months ago we started charging N1,000 for every theft-status check.

How does Legitcar work?

ANS: LegitCar was developed for two categories of users: The Individual Users, and the Business/Enterprise Users.

The Individual User just needs to visit www.legitcar.ng with the Chassis Number/Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) of the vehicles they want to verify, put it in the space provided at the homepage and follow the instructions. It costs N1,000 to access this service, and this payment is processed by Paystack. The result of the search is displayed immediately after payment, and a copy is also sent to the email address provided before the search. Victims of vehicle theft can also visit www.legitcar.ng with a valid Police Report to report their missing vehicles.

What were the initial challenges you had starting and how did you overcome them? Did you get help with funding?

ANS: One of the biggest challenges we had at that time was access to data on missing vehicles in Nigeria. This was not readily available, so we had to go out and source this data ourselves from Insurance Companies (AXA Mansard Insurance PLC was particularly helpful), Vehicle Tracking and Recovery Companies, and victims of vehicle theft. We currently have about 1,100 missing vehicles details in our database and still have a long way to go.

Funding was not one of our biggest challenges as we developed everything about LegitCar, including our web application, by ourselves. The seed funding we needed to do a lot of other things were contributed by the founders, and then HiiL Innovating Justice, The Hague, Netherlands also supported us with some training and grant funding.

What has been the response so far? How many users do you have at the moment?

ANS: We truly did not anticipate the kind of response we have gotten in such a short period of time. Last year we were named one of the best Justice Innovations in the world by HiiL Innovating Justice, The Hague, Netherlands, and this gave us the opportunity to pitch our innovation in one of the most iconic venues in the world, The Peace Palace. We are also in the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme for 2018.

We currently have about a thousand active users monthly, and seventy of them are paying users. We currently do not run any ads so all of our users are purely organic users. But we are already preparing for publicity, so in the coming weeks we would roll our ads massively and we expect our number to improve dramatically.

How many searches have been recorded on Legitcar.ng and how many successful recoveries have you made?

ANS: We currently have over 6,000 searches, though most of them were made when our service was free of charge.

What is the daily statistics like and how many theft reports do you have per day, week, month and year? Which year recorded the highest recovery of car theft since you started?

ANS: We have an average of two missing vehicles reports on a daily basis, but we also get as much as five reports a day sometimes. We expect this figure to become higher in the coming weeks when we reach more people through publicity. Last year we provided information leading to the recovery of just one missing vehicle, while our activities have led to the recovery of two missing vehicles this year.

What do you consider the most difficult challenge with this line of business?
Access to data has to be the biggest challenge anyone interested in this business will have to surmount. Since there is no readily available central database of missing vehicles in the country, data has to be painstakingly procured from a variety of sources.

Also Read: [url]This Is The Best Way To Avoid Buying A Stolen Car In Nigeria[https://www.autosage.ng/surest-way-avoid-buying-stolen-car-nigeria/]

How much support have you received from the government or any of its agencies?

The first Government Ministry to recognize our efforts was the Ministry of Finance. They featured LegitCar sometime last year in the YouWin Connect Enterprise Programme as a business capable of solving a real-life problem. The publicity we got from the feature was instrumental to some of the things we have achieved to date.

Then the Ministry of Communication Technology followed by formally endorsing our innovation as capable of adding value to law and order in Nigeria.

We are also currently working hard on a partnership with the Police which is really taking longer than we expected, but we are hoping to conclude this soon.

So far, have you been able to achieve the goals you set out to achieve at the beginning? Do you think you have scratched the surface? In essence, do you think your solution has helped to curb car theft crime in Nigeria and at what percentage?

ANS: It was the Oracle of Omaha that stated that “You can’t get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant”. We are barely a year old, producing tangible results take time.

We are just getting started, so we still have a really long way to go.

What is the future of Legitcar.ng? Where do you intend to be in the next 10 years?

In the next couple of years, we want to be the biggest player in the Nigerian vehicle security space. We want to get to that point where people will need no one to remind them that once a vehicle goes missing the next place they go to after the Police are www.legitcar.ng. Also, before anyone touches a used vehicle, the first place they go to is www.legitcar.ng

My name is Vincent Okeke, I am the Co-founder and CEO of LegitCar Enterprise.

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