Kled Bans Nigeria: 95% Fraud Rate Forces AI Data Startup To Pull iOS App

• Kled Bans Nigeria: 95% Fraud Rate Forces AI Data Startup to Pull iOS App

We have removed Kled from the Nigerian app store and IP banned the entire region.

The first thing I would like to say is I have nothing against Nigeria. I have a ton of friends from this region and these were some of our earliest app adopters. Genuinely, thank you all for the support.

Kled has been up and running and out of beta for 4 months now. We have paid out hundreds of thousands of people for their data, and our users have uploaded over 1 billion assets onto our platform.

After several months of uploads we found that Nigeria had a ≈95% fraud rate. Instead of real, usable data, users were uploading pictures of black screens, duplicate photos, internet generated images, AI generated images, etc. at an unimaginable scale.

In comparison, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines have a less than 10% fraud rate across 10x the userbase size.

Our fraud system is fast to catch these issues but the level of complexity of these schemes is getting out of hand.

This weekend we were flooded with thousands of fake Japanese passports and identity cards with Nigerians photoshopped onto them in our KYC system. That was the final straw.

As a startup we can’t afford to eat the costs of that data overhead, so we temporarily removed the app from the region while we improved our fraud detection and banning system to quickly filter out bad actors when the time is right.

On top of all of this, every time we make a post there is someone asking us to bring the region back within seconds. We hear you, but it’s gotten out of hand.

We’ve made this decision with great care. We love everyone who has genuinely supported Kled from Nigeria, and we hope to return when the time is right.

– Kled Team