We Analysed 200 Scam Messages Sent to Nigerians: Here’s How Fraudsters Try to Make People Act

We Analysed 200 Scam Messages Sent to Nigerians

*TechView Africa examined Nigeria-specific scam-message research and current fraud warnings to understand the language criminals use to create fear, excitement and trust before asking people to act. *

Fraudulent messages repeatedly try to change the recipient’s emotional state before asking for action. Fear, promised rewards, borrowed authority, urgency and manufactured trust are recurring techniques.

A fraudulent message rarely begins with: “I want to steal from you.”It creates a reason to act. TechView Africa examined the documented patterns in a Nigerian research corpus covering more than 200 scam emails and 50 SMS/messages, collected from Nigerian email accounts and phones between 2018 and 2022. We compared those findings with the Nigerian ExAIS_SMS research corpus and current fraud guidance.

The strongest lesson was surprisingly simple: scammers repeatedly try to change how the recipient feels before telling them what to do.

Five persuasion moves keep appearing

These categories can overlap. A single message can impersonate an institution, announce an urgent problem and then direct the recipient toward an action.

Fear works by creating a problem that needs fixing

The important part is not simply the false claim. It is the emotional sequence. First comes anxiety. Then comes the instruction. A person worried about losing access to money may spend less time asking whether the message itself is genuine.

The Central Bank of Nigeria describes social-engineering scams as attempts to exploit trust or fear, often through impersonation of organisations, colleagues, relatives or authority figures.

Rewards use the opposite emotion for the same purpose

Not every scam tries to frighten people, positive false alarms: messages built around an unexpected benefit, opportunity or financial reward. The emotional direction changes from anxiety to excitement but the desired behaviour can remain the same: respond before properly verifying.

The EFCC's scam guidance spans lottery, scholarship, employment, inheritance, investment, charity and other schemes, illustrating how widely the promised-benefit approach can be adapted.

Fraudsters borrow authority instead of earning trust

Banks, employers, government agencies and recognised companies already have credibility. Impersonating them allows a fraudulent message to borrow that credibility instantly.

This remains particularly relevant because Nigeria's payments industry says social engineering remains the most common fraud technique. TechView Africa’s broader analysis of 67,518 Nigerian digital-payment fraud cases and 2026 cyber alerts similarly found phishing and social engineering repeatedly appearing in the threat picture. 

The Nigerian ExAIS_SMS project reinforces why local context matters. Researchers collected 5,240 messages from 20 Nigerian mobile users, including thousands classified as spam, specifically to build an African-English SMS corpus rather than relying entirely on foreign datasets.

Politeness can also be part of the manipulation

One of the more interesting findings in the Nigerian linguistic research is the use of formulaic language: formal greetings, reassurance, expressions of gratitude and other familiar social conventions.

These features matter because fraudulent language does not always sound aggressive. Sometimes it tries to sound respectful, familiar or trustworthy enough that the request feels normal.

Our Recommendation

When an unexpected message creates strong emotion and immediately tells you what to do, separate the claim from the requested action. Do not verify a supposed bank problem through the link supplied in the message. Do not verify an unexpected prize through the contact details provided by the person announcing it, find the organisation independently.

The stories scammers tell can change quickly. The psychological objective is more consistent: make verification feel less urgent than action. Recognising that pressure may be more useful than memorising individual scam scripts.

Verification Links

De Gruyter — Discursive-Manipulative Strategies in Scam Emails and SMS: The Nigerian Perspective

ExAIS_SMS — Nigerian SMS Spam Dataset

Central Bank of Nigeria — Fraud and Scam Awareness

Economic and Financial Crimes Commission — Red Alert on Scam

PUNCH — NIBSS Digital-Payment Fraud Data for 2025

Franklin Open — Explainable AI for SMS Spam Filtering Using the Nigerian ExAIS_SMS Corpus