It hurts to see people taken advantage of because they are trying to have a better life or get access to better opportunities.
There was a time when people got scammed in all kinds of Ponzi schemes in the name of investments.
Innocent people were lured with unrealistic profits as dividends, and out of their greed, or should I say desire to make easy money, they cheaply fell for it, losing the little money they had.
I don't know how those scammers are able to come up with their tricks. The way they sweet-mouth people into believing whatever they have to offer doesn't feel ordinary.
Some months back, my mother called me to seek my verdict on one digital investment platform that her younger sister has been suggesting for her to enroll in.
After asking a few questions, I told my mother not to invest a dime in the system; it was a scam, and it was going to crash anytime soon.
She was not pleased with my opinion, but she subscribed to it anyway. When she told my aunt that she could not invest, my aunt was displeased but stopped bothering her about it.
About three weeks later, my aunt began complaining that she couldn't access her funds. Her last withdrawal was pending and hasn't dropped for quite some time, and it's unusual.
When I heard it, I remembered my own experience with student wallets, and I told my mother to advise my aunt to take her mind off whatever she had invested in the platform because it was going to crash.
Sadly, some weeks later the platform crashed and my aunt lost over 800,000 Naira.
It was the money she was keeping to roof her new house; it was all gone. I heard of people who lost millions to the project, and it was pathetic.
The project name was “NRC.” Most Nigerians know about it because one way or another, they have been affected either directly or indirectly.
During the Pi migration, some years ago, some scammers created a promo link that gives free Pi tokens to people. Those whose eyes were on reaping what they didn't sow engaged with the link and their Pi tokens were stolen.
I am not supporting scammers, but we must also learn how to guard our assets; the world is no longer safe; some people are sitting somewhere in their rooms with phones and laptops seeking how to take the money you labored tirelessly to make.
If you are the type that likes so many free things, you can easily be taken advantage of.
There is another form of scam that has been around for years; some people say the scammers use voodu or some kind of spiritual power to hypnotize people at the ATM spot, then take their cards and withdraw all their money.
I thought it was a cooked-up story until one of my neighbors at the shop experienced it; he sent his daughter to withdraw 70,000 naira, only for her to return with a different ATM card and without money.
All she could remember was that two men asked her some questions and she responded, and that was it.
The world is evil; wickedness is on the increase. We just have to be wise and careful with our money.
The bad side to all the scams around is that often the victims don't get the justice they deserve. All the victims I spoke about never got any justice; the scammers went away with their money.