Hello Nairalanders and and Nigerians in general, I'd like to bring to your attention a new kind of scam being perpetuated on the Internet and especially targeting Nigerians. Below is my experience with them and also tips on how I came to uncover their scheme.

So, having just finished a virtual assistance course, I was basically checking online for a virtual assistant job. This scheme is very tricky because it particularly targets those who are already sold to the catchphrase that you can earn money, in thousands, with just your phone.

I googled virtual assistant jobs, and as expected, this was what Google brought up.

You will notice the first two results are sponsored, meaning they are adverts, paid to show first on the result algorithm when anyone from a specific place, say Nigeria searches.

You will also notice that both of them have questionable urls. No legit website starts with such gibberish, and I am quite familiar with the Internet to understand most websites that end with .vip are shady in nature. But I was curious and I proceeded to click the first one.

Bear in mind that there are a lot of other websites like that, as I am aware both websites were clones (similar in nature).

The website I clicked brought me up to this page below. It was quite simple and all I needed to do was to click on the green link as instructed.

It will automatically redirect me to whatsapp and open up a chat link with a strange foreign number.

I cancelled and I tried the link again and it brought up another different number. It appears the link has been configured in a way to evenly share victims who click on the link to those (usually a team) who were in charge of the website, using different numbers. That way, any member of the team don't get overwhelmed. I will later realize it was even more necessary so as to propagate the scam fully when they all congregate in a Whatsapp group to fool unsuspecting victims by giving legitimacy to the project, and sharing forged payment/cashout receipts as evidence.

Anyway, I decided to chat with one of the numbers, and the following occurred.

Okay, so what happened next?
This is an interesting exposé