Scammers posing as immigration experts are harvesting the data of Nigerians through deceptive advertising tactics on TikTok, FIJ can report.
As FIJ has observed, these ads appear on users’ feeds, sometimes in between posts on users’ profiles. The ads usually contain remote job offers with stupendous salaries or promote easy ways to make money online.
In some concerning cases, the ads contain AI-generated videos of real TikTok influencers promoting non-existent loan plans for fintech giants like OPay or MoniePoint.
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However, upon clicking these links on their suggestion, one would typically find a slew of monetary offers they have to click on before they “begin” or “start” an “application”.
Once the TikTok user clicks on the start application icon before them, they are redirected to a website promoting a foreign job visa opportunity. Usually, before the end of the article on a foreign job, one would see a section where they can input their personal data. This is where the problem lies.
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FIJ found that these ads are not in English alone. There are several similar ads referencing a side hustle or promising to teach people how to get money in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa and Nigerian Pidgin English. These ad posters use deceptive tactics to lure users into clicking fraudulent links, where they then harvest their data.
FIJ found that many of the pages promoting such ads have a following on TikTok but have either no videos or fewer than two videos. Their end goal is not fully known, except that anyone whose data is input on their websites may have their data harvested.
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What gives these ads away as scams is how they promote ways to make easy money and then redirect users from TikTok to another website that asks for their data, without mentioning anything related to the “easy way to make money” they initially reference.
For example, an ad could promise users that if they click on the corresponding link, they would learn how to make money from Google Chrome. But on clicking the link, they are then asked to choose an amount of money displayed on the screen.
Once they then click on “get the money”, they are redirected to a page promoting relocation. In the end, the section where people have to input their personal details stares them in the face.
