Forex and Crypto Trading

Background

The crypto boom of 2017 and the pandemic trading wave brought markets to Nigerian phones, and Chainalysis has ranked Nigeria at or near the top of global crypto adoption indexes for years running. Some people genuinely learned to trade. A much larger number learned to look like traders, and the latter became a persistent hustlers' industry. The academy, the mentorship, and the product are all delivered in the Telegram or Signal groups of each mentor.

The boom

Trading academies and mentorship programmes appeared everywhere, fronted by young men photographed beside cars. The technicalities surrounding their source of livelihood were best left unexamined. The sales funnel was standardised through the free webinar, paid classes, premium updates, and lifetime mentorship, each tier priced just above what the student could afford, enough for desperation to drive commitment. Instagram provided the showroom, and later TikTok delivered the reach. The format was consistent across the industry: rented Benz, Dubai backdrop, a laptop showing candles, everything set up to make one a believer.

The collapses

The era produced landmark failures worth highlighting, including the MBA Forex and Capital Investment, run by Maxwell Odum, which collapsed owing investors sums the EFCC put in the hundreds of billions of Naira, one of the largest investment fraud cases in the country's history, and the prosecution has been reported extensively. one of the trading companies, Chinmark Group, folded in 2022 amid influencer-endorsed investment promises. Racksterli, the scheme founded by Michael Chidiebere Oti (also known as 'Black Gold') collapsed in mid-2021. It paid returns for a while and even bought celebrity promotion, but it eventually ended. And in April 2025, CBEX collapsed so abruptly that crowds gathered at its physical offices.

These academies never presented a legal precedent from the government to guarantee protection for customers, and Nigerians never asked.

None of these were strictly trading academies, but they shared the audience, the tactic, the aesthetics, and the trust assembly line they built, which had the same young people who paid to learn and then graduated into getting paid to teach others. Only the outliers actually attempt to trade.

The pattern

The standard lifecycle usually runs through a flashy launch, a testimonial economy, a period when early students genuinely earn from referrals and screenshots, then the collapse of student accounts, then the mentor's pivot to a new asset class the moment the old one stops trending. Forex became crypto, became NFTs, became prop firm challenges, became AI trading bots, and the same faces taught everyone about them within months of discovering it themselves. The legitimate educators exist, and they suffer the reputational damage the inauthentic mentors created for the whole category. The Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission issues periodic warnings about unregistered schemes, warnings that recur about as often as the multi-level schemes themselves. Notable ones, such as MMM, have their own entry in our records of things that we ruin.

Where it stands

Rebranding, as always, with each new asset class. The Benz is re-rented, the webinar remains free, and for some reason, there are always candles to get everyone locked in. What was ruined was the credibility of legitimate trading education, tainting the impression of crypto trading to many who may be interested in actually trading, and hundreds of thousands in first savings accounts that funded the tuition, adding to the ruin.