These days, you don’t fall in love, you fall into a scheme. If it looks like love, talks like love, and screenshots like love it might just be another Ponzi scheme with kisses.
They say every era has its scam. Ours just happens to wear perfume, send good morning texts, and ask you to “drop something.” They call it urgent 2k now, for data. This isn’t love as our parents knew it. This is love rebranded as hustle, a transaction cloaked in affection, a con powered by loneliness, and sometimes, a marriage with a business plan instead of a beating heart.
Swipe right. Say a prayer. Hope you’re not the fool.
Today, the scammer doesn’t sit behind a laptop in Lagos or Accra with a fake American accent. They sit across from you at a restaurant, offering you dreams over small chops. They sit in your DM with their desperate Hi’s. The new scammer doesn’t ask for your BVN, they ask for your time, your body, your loyalty, your sacrifice.
It used to be that when you heard of a scam, you thought of an email from a distant stranger.
Today, the scam lives in the heart. It kisses you good morning, texts you good night, and in between, it calculates your worth in naira, dollars, or survival points.
We used to think love was the softest corner of our lives. But now, in this season of lack and longing, love has become a strategy, a trade, and sometimes, a hustle.
This is not just about catfishing or sugar daddies. This is not about women milking men or men playing house to secure sponsorship. This is deeper. This is about the quiet collapse of sincerity. It’s about emotional economics in a time when the price of everything has gone up, including affection.
People don’t fall in love anymore. They invest.
And like every investment, there’s risk. But this kind? This isn’t about heartbreak. It’s about bankruptcy of trust, foreclosure on emotions, and the inflation of red flags. We are now in an economy where love is a transaction, and everyone is wearing a mask.
He says, “I miss you,” but he means, “Don’t forget my needs.”
She says, “You’re my world,” but her heart is really mapping your income.
And before you call it gold digging, stop.
This isn’t greed.
This is survival with eyeliner.
This is hunger wearing perfume.
This is pain dressed in love letters.
Many people aren’t scamming for sport, they’re scamming because life has scammed them first. They are merely adjusting to a cruel equation where emotions no longer pay rent.
The unemployed graduate who tells a lonely woman everything she wants to hear just to get a phone and a data plan isn’t always a villain. Sometimes, he’s a victim who has learned to weaponize affection because his certificates are gathering dust. The lady who dates five men, each covering different bills, isn’t always heartless. Sometimes, she’s holding her life together with a smile and a lie. And while you might want to judge, ask yourself.
When love costs more than people can afford to give freely, what happens?
What happens is what we are living.
Love used to be a refuge, now it’s a business model.
Romance has been repossessed by recession.
This isn’t about two-timing, it’s about life cornering people into wearing multiple emotional hats just to survive.
The new heartbreak isn’t being lied to, it’s realizing the lie came from a place of need.
We are not dating anymore, we are negotiating. Trust has become a luxury item, and only a few can afford it.
Affection is now an invoice, and attention, the down payment.
This isn’t love as we knew it. This is affection under inflation.
This is Nigeria’s silent pandemic. It is not transmitted through blood or touch but through desperation. The lines between scam and sacrifice have blurred so deeply that sometimes, not even the scammer knows when they started lying.
So what do we do in a country where love has become survival?
We don’t just call it out. We hold space for the broken. We teach emotional accountability. We talk to our sons about honesty and to our daughters about dignity. We name it, not to shame it, but to understand it.
Because if we keep quiet, this won’t just be a social trend. It will be our cultural ruin.
So, here’s the truth.
Not every love scam is a crime.
Some are just cries for help dressed in the language of romance.
And until we rebuild the economy of hope, people will continue to invest emotions they don’t have, in relationships they don’t want, just to pay bills they didn’t create.
Welcome to love in the age of survival.
And we fall. Not because we’re stupid, but because we’re starved. In a world where life is transactional, people have turned love into the new currency. Hearts are broken over borrowed wigs, iPhone promises, and fake vulnerability. Even the ones who mean well now show love with price tags and proof of payments.
Our mothers prayed for good men. Our daughters screenshot bank alerts.
We don’t date anymore. We investigate. We send screenshots to friends. We pray to not be the next victim of someone who used “God-fearing” as a brand but had deception in their soul.
Sometimes, it’s the girl who fakes an entire personality to land the “man of her prayers.” Sometimes, it’s the guy who pretends to be a provider until wedding day, then transforms into an unemployed tyrant. Other times, it’s the couple who stage a wedding as a publicity stunt for their YouTube channel. The love was never real. The monetisation plan was.
And the victims? They’re everywhere. Women who gave womb and wallet only to be replaced. Men who built empires with lovers who were building exits. Singles who gave the last of their emotional credit to someone running a full-blown Ponzi scheme with multiple hearts on the side.
What does love even mean in the age of monetised affection?
It means nothing, if it’s not rooted in truth.
This is not an attack on generosity or gift-giving or softness in relationships. It’s a call to wake up from a national delusion, that affection equals authenticity. It doesn’t. People are performing love like theatre, and we’re the paying audience. The worst part? Some of us know we’re being scammed, but the show is so sweet, we stay until the betrayal gets unbearable.
And you know the scam works best when it plays the long game. They won’t hit you immediately. They build trust. They meet your friends. They pray with you. They follow your mum on Facebook. And then slowly, systematically, they drain you emotionally, financially, spiritually until you’re a shadow of who you were, wondering how you got here.
But there’s a reason these scams work so well.
Because in Nigeria, loneliness is louder than common sense.
We’re lonely in traffic, lonely in weddings, lonely in church, lonely on our birthdays. And in that emptiness, we accept illusions of love over the absence of it. We marry for convenience. We date for survival. We post for clout. Real love that deep, gut-wrenching, soul-cleansing, sacrificial thing has become a relic.
Desperation, affection, and deceit are blending into something more dangerous than a 419.
You see, we grew up learning about the infamous 419 emails from fake accounts, fake contracts, and fake businesses. But no one warned us about emotional fraud. No one told us that someday, someone would study your pain, mirror your longings, and weaponize affection into a tool of extortion. This is not a scam of account numbers and PIN codes. It’s a deeper kind of con, a heist of the heart disguised as love.
In a country where survival now requires more than a job, love has become a hustle.
From Lagos to Lokoja, from Abuja to Instagram DMs, people are falling in love not for companionship, but for capital. We’re not dating anymore, we’re transacting. We’re not loving, we’re investing, hoping for emotional returns, financial liquidity, or social elevation.
And this is no longer just women being targeted. Men, especially the emotionally unavailable, socially lonely, or newly vulnerable are being lured into meticulously crafted fantasies. A voice that checks in every morning. A photo that tugs at the loins. A conversation that disarms. And just before they know it, there’s a crisis. A mother in the hospital. A brother in prison. A child whose tuition is overdue. Cue the transfer.
It’s not about foolishness; it’s about emotional currency.
They’re not after your bank account. They’re after your bandwidth. your need to feel seen, wanted, heard.
We used to tell young people to be careful of one-night stands. Now we must warn them of one-month stands with people who’ve read enough psychology to impersonate a soulmate. Love scams today are not run by amateurs. They’re curated by people who understand timing, trauma, and the algorithms of loneliness.
When the economy falters, the heart becomes a marketplace. And in Nigeria’s current crisis, where inflation is high and dignity is low, romance has mutated. It’s no longer about flowers and dreams. It’s about exits and leverage. People are loving up just to level up.
The real scam isn’t the fake account. It’s the fact that affection has become an economic strategy.
And in the middle of this emotional chaos are real people. People who genuinely crave love. Who genuinely show up. Who genuinely believe in connection. And when they fall into the web of the fraudster, they’re not just scammed they’re broken in ways that banks can’t refund.
This is the new face of emotional violence. Pretend to love them, destroy them, vanish.
We must start naming it. We must start shaming it. We must teach our children that love without integrity is terrorism with flowers.
Because if this continues, we’ll raise a generation that can no longer trust a good morning text. A generation where every “I miss you” triggers trauma. A generation where love itself becomes suspect.
This is not just about heartbreak, it’s about identity theft of the soul.
We must interrogate the society that gave birth to this madness. One where joblessness fuels deception. One where survivalism chokes sincerity. One where even intimacy has been monetized. It’s time to ask ourselves the hard questions.
When did dating become a negotiation?
When did love become synonymous with debt?
And how do we heal a generation that can no longer differentiate genuine affection from digital manipulation?
Until we fix this moral code, emotional fraud will only escalate. It’s no longer about who’s scamming. it’s about what we’ve normalized.
Because when love becomes a hustle, no one wins.
Love is no longer a feeling. it’s a feature. They didn’t break your heart. They broke your trust fund of hope.The new romance isn’t romantic, it’s strategic. Beware of the ones who call you ‘babe’ with a budget in mind. You didn’t fall in love. You fell into a business model.
Still, there is hope
There are people who love for real. Quietly. Gently. Not because of what they can get but because of what they can give without expectation. They are rare, but they exist. They are not loud, so we overlook them. But when you find one, you’ll know because real love doesn’t need a stage. It just needs two hearts, telling the truth. So as you swipe, flirt, pray, and hope again this week, remember.
Not all that glitters is gold. Sometimes, it just cheap affection sprayed with filters and lies. And not all who say “I love you” mean it. Some just want your password, your peace or your rent. In this age of survival, let your heart have a firewall. Because love, sadly, is the new scam.
The post Love scam now Nigeria’s silent pandemic, by Stephanie Shaakaa appeared first on Vanguard News.
