The TAG

In the afternoon of last Friday, I was seated while scrolling through social media in a bid to relieve some stress from the heap of clothes I had just finished washing. Precious, a guy who once stayed in our street, walked in looking a bit dirty from the clothes he was wearing, and I didn't waste time asking him if he was coming from the farm because he owns a pepper farm, and he concurred and rushed to rest in the office chair that's close to the door.

"Please hand me a sachet of water", he stretched his right hand towards me while pointing at the bags of sachet water close to where I was seated. I handed him one sachet, he gulped it once, took a deep breath, and the next thing he did was to ask if I knew anything about "TAG"

"Tag? What's Tag? Is that a new species of peppers?"

"Hehehe! Who's talking about pepper here? I'm referring to an investment platform that's gifting phones, bags of rice, power banks, and so many other things to their registered investors"

As I heard that, my ears perked up, and the curiosity in me rose because who wouldn't want to be given these items for free? "Do you mean they give people all these for free? Like, people don't need to deposit any money?"

"For free, keh? Didn't you hear me mention investment?" As he replied, the laughter that followed was funny and, at the same time, not funny.

"I decided to tell you because I know you have a great interest in earning money online. This TAG is very legit; they have an office in town here, and they just started. I wouldn't have believed it until my sister was gifted an android phone two days ago, come and see it" He walked to my position, showed me the photo of the phone won.

"Haaaa! This thing looks interesting but suspicious at the same time. I was once into Ponzi, in fact, I was the leader of my group, and I know how this thing works, no matter how they're branding it, this is ponzi and nothing more, or do you want to doubt me?" I said all this, beating my chest with my hand as a way of telling him I'm very sure, and he smiled all through.

_"Yeah, I know they're going to run away one day with people's money, but for now, they're very real, and they've come to stay. Didn't you hear that they have an office in town?"_He continued and hoped to win a soul for the company.

"Forget that thing! The office is just a way of enchanting people or haven't you heard of such schemes that had offices everywhere in Nigeria and later duped their Investors?"

We went on until I asked for the website's link to register, he sent it to me on WhatsApp, and I laughed out loud while staring at the very familiar website link that has 'xyz' as the domain. The website looks very familiar to the ones I've registered on at different times. The suspiciousness from the website was so obvious, but then, he insisted that the TAG company is still paying their investors with their investment intact.

At one point, I got the urge to go ahead and register so I could give it a shot, hoping that I would get to cash out a lot before the system crashed, because it was definitely going to crash. I registered at that moment, and Precious became very happy because he was going to earn referral bonuses.

"Don't be happy yet. I'm not depositing any money yet. Let me observe it for a while," I told him, and at that moment, I didn't have a reasonable amount of money in my account if I were interested in depositing the minimum amount required.

"You mean you don't have an ordinary fifteen thousand naira to spare?" He knew his question was laughable, so he laughed as he walked out of my workspace. He kicked his push-to-start bike up to five times and zoomed off.

As for me, I didn't think about it again. His present went away with the little interest I was trying to groom.

Saturday morning, he messaged me around 7:50am while I was on my way to my workplace, asking if I had made up my mind to deposit money, and I replied to him quickly with a voice note saying no.

On Tuesday morning, he sent another message saying I shouldn't proceed with depositing yet, in case I wanted to deposit.

I smiled at the message and didn't bother to ask him why because I already knew that there was a problem.