A disguised wig seller is on the prowl to defraud unsuspecting customers across different social media platforms.

At press time, the fraudster had thousands of potential victims as followers on TikTok, Facebook and Telegram.

Anabel Adigun (pseudonym), a media practitioner, told FIJ that her sister (name withheld) was a victim of this scam.

“My younger sister fell for it losing N65,000 then when she reported to me. I found out online that it was a known scammer as some posted online. My sister didn’t check,” Adigun said.

On TikTok, the fraudster’s page is @affordable_thrift_wig, with up to 6,651 followers. They post daily videos of new wigs for sale.

The page has a link that leads to a Telegram group that also had up to 3,673 members at press time.

When FIJ requested to join the Telegram group, it took days to be accepted. After joining the Telegram group, FIJ saw that the group was locked to prevent chats. The victims were effectively barred from sharing their encounters with the fraudster with other group members.

Seeing other members of the group was also not allowed.

After her sister had been scammed, Adigun attempted to figure out who the fraudster was, but her efforts yielded nothing significant.

The only useful information she found was the name MARRY SAMUEL on the bank account details the person forwarded to her sister. That name matched the one she got when she tried to order a wig, although the account numbers and banks were different.

Marry Samuel is also a popular fraudster on Facebook, FIJ found.

To avoid being traced, Marry Samuel keeps her contact details hidden. Telegram only permits mutually saved contacts to bypass this privacy feature.

Marry Samuel has used two mobile money apps to operate: Moniepoint and PalmPay.

FIJ emailed both Moniepoint and PalmPay to notify them of the fraudulent accounts, but neither had responded at press time.