Most of the conversation around online fraud in Nigeria centres on buyers. The buyer who paid and received nothing. The buyer who got a brick in a laptop box. The buyer who transferred and was blocked. These stories are real and they are common and they deserve the attention they get.

But they are only half the picture.

Sellers get defrauded too. Regularly. And because the narrative around online commerce almost always positions the seller as the threat and the buyer as the vulnerable party, seller fraud is talked about less, reported less, and protected against far less than it should be.

Kemi found this out the hard way.

She had been selling for two years without incident

Kemi runs a small business selling organic skincare products from her home in Ibadan. She built her customer base slowly, mostly through Instagram and WhatsApp referrals. Most of her buyers were regulars or came through people she knew. She had never had a serious problem.

So when a new customer reached out asking for a bulk order — twelve units of her bestselling body butter, to be gifted to bridesmaids — it felt like the kind of order she had been working toward. Larger than usual. A new customer. But nothing that raised alarm.

"She was polite. She knew the products. She even asked the right questions about ingredients for sensitive skin. Everything felt normal."

They agreed on a total of ₦78,000. The buyer said she would pay immediately and asked for the account details.

The alert came. The products left.

Within minutes, a bank notification appeared on Kemi's phone. The amount matched exactly. The sender name looked right. She screenshotted it, felt the familiar relief of a confirmed order, and began packaging immediately. The buyer had mentioned she needed the products within two days for a pre-wedding event.

Kemi packaged everything carefully, labelled each unit, arranged a dispatch rider, and sent the products out the same afternoon.

That evening, she opened her banking app to record the transaction in her books.

The money was not there.

What buyer fraud actually looks like

Seller-targeted fraud takes several forms, but the fake alert method is among the most common and the most effective because it exploits the window between payment notification and balance confirmation. Most sellers, especially small business owners processing multiple orders, do not open their banking app to verify every transaction before dispatching. They see the notification, feel the confirmation, and move on.

That window is exactly what this type of fraud is designed to exploit.

Other forms of buyer fraud include the swap scam, common in high-value item exchanges, where a buyer returns a damaged or counterfeit version of a product and demands a refund for the original.

What connects all of them is the same structural gap: the seller has already given up the goods or the service before any confirmed, irrevocable payment has been secured.

The part that stung most

"What hurt wasn't just the money. It was that I had put care into those products. I made them myself. I packaged them well. I even included a thank you note."

Kemi spent the next two days trying to trace the dispatch rider and the delivery address. The address was real but led to a building where no one recognised the name the buyer had given.

She reported to her bank. They confirmed what she already suspected: the alert had come from a third-party application, not from a genuine transfer. There was no transaction to reverse. No account to flag. No money to recover.

She posted about it privately in a sellers' group. Several others had similar stories. Some had lost more. Most had not reported it anywhere because they did not believe reporting would help.

What Kemi changed after

Kemi now has one rule for every order above a certain amount: nothing dispatches until she has opened her banking app and confirmed the credit in her transaction history. Not a notification. Not a screenshot. Not a voice note from a buyer saying the transfer has been sent. Her actual account balance, updated and confirmed.

For larger orders, she has started requesting payment through PayOak, where the buyer's funds are held in escrow before she packages or ships anything. The buyer cannot access the money once it is in escrow. Kemi cannot access it either until delivery is confirmed. But she knows it is real, it is secured, and it is waiting.

"It changed how I feel about new customers. Not suspicious exactly. Just more structured. I don't have to guess anymore."

She has not lost another order since.

Why sellers need this conversation

The assumption that sellers are always the party with power in an online transaction is outdated and, in many cases, wrong. Small vendors, independent sellers, and solo service providers are often operating without contracts, without verified payment systems, and without any structural protection if a buyer decides not to follow through honestly.

Escrow does not just protect buyers. It protects sellers too. When a buyer's payment is secured before goods leave a seller's hands, the fake alert window disappears entirely. There is no alert to evaluate. There is no trust to extend to a stranger. The money is confirmed and held by a neutral system, and the seller dispatches with the same confidence a physical cash transaction would provide.

That is the baseline every seller deserves. And it is available now.