It was one of those lazy weekends when life in town slows down just enough for stories to find you. I met Usman, not his real name, an apprentice who trails his boss to building sites with cement dust on his shirt and a phone he checks like it holds the key to his future. Usman cannot read or write, yet he scrolls, taps, and whispers. That afternoon he leaned in and said the NRC that crashed was not a good thing. I moved closer, the way you do when a Nollywood plot twist is about to drop. “I lost about 50,000,” he said, eyes steady. Then, without missing a beat, “But there is a new one I am doing now.”
My chest tightened. A man who just admitted losing hard-earned money was already inside another “investment.” He showed me his phone, daily deposits except weekends, money in, money multiplied, no explanation of business, no product, just figures and promises. His boss called him away to carry blocks and he vanished into the site, leaving me with that familiar, cold feeling that Nigeria had not buried Ponzi, it had only renamed it.
What Usman described is not new, only dressed in new clothes. A Ponzi scheme is fraud built on a simple, ancient lie: pay old investors with money from new ones, and pray the line of new people never ends. The name comes from Charles Ponzi in Boston, 1920, who promised 50% in 45 days trading postal coupons but paid no one from trade. Before him, in the 1880s, Sarah Howe ran the Ladies’ Deposit Company on the same trick. After him came Bernard Madoff, who kept the illusion alive for decades until 2008, when panic withdrawals exposed over US$60 billion gone.
Scholars call this the mechanics of deception. Sociologist Robert K. Merton would call it anomie, a society where the pressure to succeed meets limited legitimate means, so people invent shortcuts. Behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explain the rest: optimism bias, herd behavior, and loss aversion make a victim double down after a loss, exactly what Usman did. “I must recover it,” the mind says, and so it jumps into the next scheme with even more courage than caution.
Nigeria knows this story too well. From MMM in 2015 that promised 30% monthly and swallowed an estimated ₦18–₦20 billion from over 3 million people, to Ultimate Cycler, Loom Money on WhatsApp, MBA Forex with losses said to be above ₦170 billion, Chinmark, Racksterli, and CBEX in 2026 that left withdrawals frozen and estimates in the hundreds of billions, the script never changes. Only the props change: forex, crypto, AI trading, peer-to-peer, now “National Reading Culture.”
That was the genius and cruelty of NRC. It borrowed the respectability of books to sell greed. A July 2026 poll by Digital Data Clinic, led by Ibrahim Babangida Lawal, surveyed 164 to 165 victims in the “MATTERS ARISING” WhatsApp community and painted a grim picture. The average reported loss was about ₦396,909. Nearly half put in between ₦100,000 and ₦500,000. About 27% lost between ₦200,000 and ₦500,000, and 15% lost above ₦1 million. Only 11% lost less than ₦50,000.
Project that across an estimated 3 million subscribers and you are staring at a potential ₦1.19 trillion hole in households, small businesses, and the informal economy. Financial literacy scholars like Annamaria Lusardi have long warned that when people cannot distinguish interest from profit, or risk from return, they become perfect targets. Add Nigeria’s realities, high unemployment, inflation, economic hardship, low regulatory oversight, and viral social proof, and the soil is fertile.
And it is not only Ponzi. The same desperation feeds the other modern addiction: sports betting. Bet9ja, SportyBet, 1xBet, BetKing, BangBet, names now spoken like prayers in barbershops and lecture halls. Young men, and sometimes students with school fees in hand, tap to wager on football, basketball, tennis, virtual games, and casino spins.
The older generation still calls lottery “Baba Ijebu,” now officially Premier Lotto, but the logic is identical. A small stake, a big dream, and the dopamine hit of “almost winning.” Psychologists call this variable-ratio reinforcement, the same mechanism that keeps people pulling slot levers. Economist Niall Ferguson has noted that gambling and speculative bubbles thrive when people feel the future is uncertain but the present is unbearable. So they bet on a goal in the 90th minute, or on a daily “multiplier” that Usman believes will restore his 50,000.
That is why I am afraid these schemes have come to stay. Not because Nigerians love to lose money, but because the incentives to try again are stronger than the memory of the last crash. Government has a role, tighter SEC regulation, early-warning systems, asset recovery, and mass financial education. But policy alone cannot cure desperation. As long as a young apprentice who cannot read believes his phone can multiply money overnight, as long as “everyone is doing it” feels safer than due diligence, Ponzi and betting will keep shape-shifting. The technology moves from postal coupons to crypto to AI, yet the engine remains the same: new money paying old promises until it stops.
I keep thinking of Usman walking back with blocks on his head, phone in his pocket, hope in his heart. He is not foolish. He is human, and he is responding to an economy that tells him to hustle or be left behind. Until we build real pathways to wealth that are slow, boring, and legal, the cookie will keep crumbling the same way, with new names, new victims, and the same old heartbreak.
