Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, has found itself yet again facing fraud allegations. Kled, a 4-month-old startup that buys data from individuals and sells to companies, has removed its app from the Nigerian app store.
“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,” stated Avi Patel, the founder of Kled.
Patel claims that Nigerians attempted to sign up as Japanese nationals. He alleges the fraudsters photoshopped Japanese passports and identity cards with the goal of using the fake documents as part of the platform’s KYC process.
“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,” Patel wrote.
“Over 500 of these fake Japanese IDs alone were submitted to our system in the last 48 hours, I believe,” Patel added.
Notably, the app still maintains a presence in Africa, as the founder states they will continue to “support every other area in Africa.”
Nigeria has been a good source of traffic in the four months the platform has been online. In that timeframe, Kled secured a spot among the top 100 apps on the Nigerian App Store.
Patel says they may return to work with individuals from the country “when the time is right.”
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Kled sells data it buys from individuals to large enterprises and AI labs in a multimodal format. It’s an opt-in human data collection platform that claims 3 million files are uploaded daily from about 200,000 data contributors.
The startup claims to have collected 12,000+ structured datasets spanning egocentric data, medical data, urban travel data, and more.
It has received a total of $9 million in financing, with the latest seed round of $5.5 million coming in March.
