Nigeria scams: investment pitches lead, and most victims get hit again

Investment scams are the biggest way scammers reach Nigerian adults, ahead of fake prize notices and impersonation calls. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, 40% of adults who interacted with a scam in the past year interacted with an investment pitch, more than any other category.

The scale behind that number is large. GASA found that 84% of Nigerian adults encountered a scam in the past year, and 54% went further and interacted with a scammer directly. Of those, 22% lost money or shared personal information that was later used to steal from them. Unexpected money scams came second at 33% of interactions, and impersonation scams third at 30%.

How the loss repeats itself

The mechanism that matters most here is not the first contact. It is the second one. GASA's research shows that 62% of people who lost money were scammed more than once, and on average these victims lost money 2.4 times over the year. A scam does not end when someone pays once. The same person, having already shown they will engage and pay, becomes a target again.

Samuel Oluwasogo of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission described how a single scam typically moves. It starts on a messaging platform, then becomes a bank transfer, then crosses several financial institutions before anyone can act. Each handoff, from chat app to bank account to a second or third institution, is a point where the scam could be stopped and currently is not.

Confidence does not match ability

Only 49% of respondents said they felt confident they could identify a scam. Dr. Robinson Tombari Sibe, CEO and Lead Forensic Examiner at Digital Footprints, said that digital knowledge alone does not make someone immune, especially when criminals are exploiting trust, urgency, emotion and familiar contexts rather than technical ignorance. He also warned that the old advice, to look for poor spelling or obvious mistakes, is losing its usefulness as scammers increasingly use AI to write convincingly.

The financial toll recorded by GASA is ₦7.36 trillion lost by Nigerian adults over the past year, with victims losing an average of approximately ₦257,008. The damage is not only financial. 74% of victims said the experience had a moderate or significant impact on their mental wellbeing.

What this changes for a reader

A scam does not treat a first payment as the end of the interaction. It treats it as a qualification: proof the target will pay again. Anyone who has already sent money once should expect contact again, often through a different pitch, and should treat a second approach with more suspicion, not less.