An international tech CEO has shut down access to his AI app across Nigeria, saying the platform was overwhelmed by fraud.
The founder, Avi Patel, announced Monday on X that his company had removed its app from Nigeria’s App Store and blocked all Nigerian IP addresses.
Patel runs Kled, an AI data marketplace that pays users to upload images, videos, and documents used to train artificial intelligence systems. The app launched about four months ago and has already processed more than 1 billion assets while paying hundreds of thousands of users globally, according to the company.
Nigeria became a major issue for the platform. After several months of uploads, the company found the fraud rate from Nigeria was about 95%. Instead of usable data, most submissions were black screens, duplicate photos, images pulled from the internet, and AI-generated content submitted at massive scale.
By contrast, the company said Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines had fraud rates below 10% despite having a user base ten times larger.
Patel said the situation escalated last weekend when the platform’s identity verification system was overwhelmed with thousands of fake Japanese passports and ID cards that had been altered to include Nigerian users. He described the incident as the final straw.
Although Kled’s fraud detection system catches most scams quickly, the company said the complexity of the schemes had become unmanageable.
Patel called the ban a business survival decision, explaining that the startup could not afford the data overhead costs caused by the fraud. He described the block as temporary and said the company hopes to return to Nigeria when conditions improve.
He denied the move was a marketing stunt, arguing that it would not make sense to ban a region and then market to it.
The company also clarified that Kled is only available on iOS, not Android, and warned that a fake version of the app is circulating online.
According to Patel, Kled had over 25,000 users in Nigeria. In a sample of 10 million uploads from the country, 94.2% were fraudulent. He said the company would have kept the app in Nigeria if the fraud rate had been 50% or lower, but 95% was too high to sustain.
Nigeria is the only country affected by the ban. The app remains available in every other country in Africa, the company said.
Patel described the public reaction as emotionally charged and said the decision was based on business factors with no racial motivation. He asked critics to respect the company’s choice.
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