Data startup Kled exits Nigeria citing widespread fraud and fake IDs

A data-collection startup, Kled, says it has removed its app from Nigeria’s app stores and blocked access from the country, citing what it described high fraud rate among user submissions and escalating abuse of its identity verification system.

“We have removed Kled from the Nigerian app store and IP banned the entire region,” the company said in a statement posted by its founder, Avi Patel, on X.

The decision comes just four months after the platform exited beta. Kled, which pays users to upload data that is later sold to companies and AI labs, said it has already paid “hundreds of thousands of people” and received more than one billion uploaded assets globally.

But the company said Nigeria stood out for the scale and sophistication of fraudulent activity.

“After several months of uploads we found that Nigeria had a ≈95% fraud rate,” the statement said. “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.”

By contrast, the company said markets such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines recorded fraud rates of less than 10% despite having significantly larger user bases.

Kled said its automated fraud detection tools had been effective initially but were increasingly overwhelmed. “Our fraud system is fast to catch these issues but the level of complexity of these schemes is getting out of hand,” the founder said.

The tipping point, according to the company, came over the weekend when its know-your-customer (KYC) system was inundated with falsified identity documents.

“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,” the statement said.

The startup said it could not sustain the operational costs associated with filtering large volumes of low-quality or fraudulent data. “As a startup we can’t afford to eat the costs of that data overhead,” it added, noting that the removal is temporary while it upgrades its fraud detection and banning systems.

Despite the move, Kled sought to strike a conciliatory tone toward legitimate Nigerian users. “The first thing I would like to say is I have nothing against Nigeria,” the founder said. “We have a ton of friends from this region and these were some of our earliest app adopters.”

The company added that it hopes to return. “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.”

Nigeria had been a key growth market for the platform, helping it rank among the top 100 apps locally within months of launch. Kled said it will continue operating in other regions, including elsewhere in Africa.