The Publisher of Internet Safety Magazine and CEO of Stay Safe Online Academy Ltd, Rotimi Onadipe, has revealed that lack of education about scams and how to avoid them was a major reason why many Nigerians lost their hard-earned money to CBEX, the Ponzi Scheme which crashed few days ago.
Onadipe, a renowned advocate for online safety, made this known on Saturday while speaking during the 153rd edition of his training program, aimed at educating internet users about online safety and fraud prevention.
The theme of the training program is “The Importance Of Staying Safe Online At All Times.”
Recall that over 600,000 (six hundred thousand) Nigerians reportedly invested in the crashed trading platform and lost N1.3 trillion.
Addressing newsmen at Internet Safety Magazine Headquarters in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, Onadipe attributed the massive financial loss to lack of proper education about scam prevention tips.
He said: “We must be informed that scammers are becoming more sophisticated in their criminal activities every day, adding more to their knowledge about how to convince and deceive their victims to investing their hard-earned money in any business they introduce to them.”
“While scammers are adding more to their knowledge every day about how to defraud people, we also need to arm ourselves with knowledge about how to avoid falling for their scams. This is very important because scammers don’t give up on their victims. They will still come back in a different form, with different identity, and more sophisticated tricks,” Onadipe added.
According to him, the crashed trading platform deceived and defrauded Nigerians through Ponzi Scheme, a very common type of scam that had been existing for several years. He noted that the organisers only changed their strategy to make it look different, legitimate and more sophisticated. He added that it was the same old scam but was presented in another form.
“Proper education about scams and how to avoid them is what we all need now. What happened to many Nigerians few days ago could have been avoided if the victims were well informed about scams and how to avoid them.”
“While I sympathize with the victims of the crashed trading platform, I want to inform the public that it is not too late to learn about how to avoid falling victim to scams and frauds.” the online safety advocated stated.
In his concluding statement, Onadipe noted that Proper education remained the only strong weapon to win the war against scammers and scams in today’s digital world. He also assured Nigerians that his newly established facility, Stay Safe Online Academy Ltd, has all it takes to educate Nigerians about how to detect and avoid scams and other online dangers.
