Not All That Glitters Is A Sugar Daddy

It was one of those busy days at work when everyone was seated in their various departments helping out customers. And there I was, sitting pretty with a lovely office white shirt, a Mickey Mouse tie, with a silver wristwatch, tie clips and silver cufflinks to compliment my outfit.

I was helping a customer to get an ATM card.

Next was a guy (for the purpose of this story, let’s call him Tee) in his twenties. He asked if I was free, and I answered yes.

“Are you next?” I asked.

He nodded, saying, “Yes.”

So I gestured him forward to take a seat. “How may I help you?”

And so, this young man started off with how someone siphoned all of his 163 thousand naira from his account. I’d seen and heard of complaints like this, and they mostly are cases of the POS or ATM declining the cards and yet the accounts are debited.

However, that was not the case here, I would soon learn.

Tee continued, saying that he’d been texting his uncle online and this uncle requested for his bank details, that he wanted to send money across to him. After giving the uncle the bank details, the uncle then sent him a link and told Tee that he can assess the money after he has filled in his card details through clicking the link.

And Tee went right ahead. He clicked the link and then filled in his card details, so thrilled by the promise the uncle had made of him getting the sum of 450 dollars.

Except, of course, he didn’t get any 450 dollars; instead, after he was done providing all these details, the uncle stopped chatting with him and all of the 163 thousand naira in his account vanished!

When I heard all of this, I asked Tee for his account number so I could check who took the money from his account. I asked him what his uncle’s name was and he said it was Sir Bernard.

Well, the name of the recipient of his money was Opeyemi Ajijola. And I told him this, breaking the unfortunate news to him that he had been scammed through the link he clicked.

Before he left my work station thoroughly dejected, I took his number to call him afterwards. And it was during this after-office-hours chat that Tee told me exactly what happened.

There was no uncle. Tee, it turns out, is gay and he’d been texting with someone on Grindr, someone who claimed to be an American from Texas. They had exchanged WhatsApp contacts and Google hangouts, plus the fact that this person on the other end had a foreign number, all of which made his identity believable to Tee. And during their chats, he’d made promises to Tee, about how he was going to spoil him and all that jazz. And then, he said that he could only wire money to Tee’s account, after which he sent the link to Tee with the instructions about supplying his bank information for him to be able to assess the money.

And the rest, they say, is history.

There was of course no Texan. There was just Opeyemi Ajijola.

And so, I am here to exhort you guys to be careful. I have seen the Grindr scam warnings that have been posted here on Kito Diaries. They are real. Do not be fooled by these faceless ‘American’ strangers full of promises about how they are sugar daddies looking for guys to spoil.

ABSOLUTELY DO NOT CLICK on any links from Grindr or any hookup site.

ABSOLUTELY DO NOT SUPPLY your card details on any online transactions that aren’t of your own initiation.

And when that person comes to you with promises of sending you money from America, tell them to send it through Western Union or MoneyGram and you can then assess it from any bank in Nigeria. Either that or they can keep their ‘dollars’.

Let’s continue to stay safe and alert over our welfare.

Regards

Written by Kenny