When Mukhtar Dahiru saw a TikTok video promising he could make money on WhatsApp, he clicked without hesitation. Within days, after he shared a one-time password with the “recruiters”, his WhatsApp account was hijacked, his cryptocurrency wallets drained. He later realised the “opportunity” had been a scam.

“The road is tricky, and this time I fell for it,” he said.

Behind his loss lies a wider scam network preying on thousands. For several Hausa-speaking social media users across northern Nigeria, the promise of making money has become a lure into a sprawling fraud that turns ordinary people into unwitting accomplices and casualties.

On TikTok, the promise appears in dozens of videos, usually featuring a speaker in Hausa urging viewers to join a WhatsApp group to start earning. “Click on the link below to learn how to make money,” one of the videos says.  “I’ve made a large amount on WhatsApp, and so can you.”

HumAngle’s month-long monitoring revealed that many of these accounts belonged to real users, while others used deepfakes or manipulated videos. Nearly all featured genuine human faces to strengthen credibility and lure victims.

What makes the scheme particularly effective is TikTok’s algorithmic boost. The clips are upbeat, under a minute, tagged with captions like “samu kudi ta WhatsApp” (“earn money on WhatsApp”), and often promoted through paid sponsorships. This visibility pushes them into thousands of feeds, magnifying their reach. 

As of January 2025, TikTok had an estimated 37.4 million users in Nigeria. Meanwhile, WhatsApp remains the country’s most widely used messaging app, with over 51 million active users — about one in four mobile lines nationwide. Together, these figures show how even a small fraction of TikTok’s audience clicking through can funnel hundreds of thousands of people into WhatsApp scam networks.

The funnel of fraud

Once viewers click the link from the videos, they are funnelled to hastily built websites or directly into WhatsApp groups, which present themselves as “training hubs” offering “tasks” or “affiliate opportunities”.

One WhatsApp group, named Daily Updates, had more than 400 members when archived by HumAngle. These groups act as the glue of the operation; hundreds of recruits are placed into shared chat rooms, where the scam is scaled and coordinated.

Inside these rooms, the onboarding phase is simple: surrender your credentials in exchange for small, regular payouts. This is where the exploitation sets in. LetShare.ng, a central website in the network, even promises ₦2460 instantly through QR codes that secretly grant scammers control of users’ WhatsApp accounts.

LetShare.ng was registered in December 2024, according to WhoIs.com, a website that documents who owns and registers a website. The registrant details are hidden, typical of scam operations. Several other related websites were created within weeks of each other and masked by privacy-protected registrars, giving the network a veneer of legitimacy through glossy logos and testimonials.

The glue holding this ecosystem together is referrals. On the LetShare site, recruits are promised ₦300 for every person they bring in. One man told HumAngle he had earned over ₦30,000 this way, meaning he had introduced more than 100 people. 

This referral model fuels relentless promotion on TikTok, as each recruit scrambles to register others under their name. “Everyone is looking for someone to register through them,” he explained. 

‘It looked like a real job’

The abstract funnel becomes devastatingly real in people’s lives.

This was how Aminu Usman nearly lost money. He told HumAngle that someone posing as his friend asked him for ₦5000, promising a quick repayment. Suspicious, Aminu called his friend, who denied sending the message. His friend later admitted he had been hacked after joining a so-called digital hustle group.

Others were less fortunate. One young man, who declined to give his name, told HumAngle that he had handed over his WhatsApp credentials after being promised steady commissions. “It looked like a real job,” he said. “They paid me ₦12,000 the first week after I gave them access to my WhatsApp account.”

However, within a short period, his WhatsApp number was suspended. He later learned it had been used to spread fraudulent offers to strangers, mostly among his contacts and which forced him to make a disclaimer.

For recruits like these, the cycle almost always ends the same way: suspension, blacklisted numbers, and reputations in tatters, while the operators move swiftly to fresh victims. The people caught in this web are sometimes referred to as “mules.”

“The motivation is always greediness,” Mahmud Labaran Galadanci, a cybersecurity expert, told HumAngle. “In reality, the people who join such schemes end up becoming victims through phishing attacks and leverage scams.”

The Hausa connection

What makes this operation distinctive is its local tailoring. Hausa is one of Africa’s most widely spoken languages, with more than 60 million speakers across Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and beyond. On platforms like TikTok, it bridges anglophone and francophone audiences, giving scammers both reach and trust.

HumAngle found dozens of Hausa-language TikTok videos promising ways to “make money on WhatsApp.” Some had racked up thousands of views, with comments reinforcing the illusion of legitimacy.

By using Hausa and familiar slang, operators project trust and cultural proximity. Viewers see themselves reflected on screen, searching for opportunity in a region where unemployment is high and digital literacy is low.

“It is not just about language,” said Mahmud. “It is about trust. These messages are crafted to convince people to click and join the long trail of the scheme.”

However, it is not happening only in Nigeria’s North. Similar schemes are targeting social media users in the country’s South and around the world, where authorities describe them as “task scams” — small paid actions that lure people into larger fraud.

Globally, platforms are struggling to respond. Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, periodically reports banning millions of accounts linked to scams. 

TikTok, meanwhile, insists it is stepping up enforcement. Announcing new safety guidelines that came into effect on Sept. 13, Sandeep Grover, the company’s Global Head of Trust and Safety, said: “Over 85 per cent of the content removed for violating our Community Guidelines is identified and taken down by automation, and 99 per cent of that content we remove before anybody reports it to us.”

“We want to make sure that our community is able to safeguard against such scams,” Grover added. In August 2024, the company also launched a Sub-Saharan Africa Safety Advisory Council.

Yet, HumAngle found that TikTok had accepted sponsored promotions for scam videos of this kind, despite policies that claim to prohibit it.

Back in Northern Nigeria, the consequences are particularly severe. Weak digital literacy and high unemployment make communities vulnerable, while the absence of Hausa-language moderation on TikTok has allowed scammers, like jihadists before them, to exploit the platform unchecked.