How to spot a fake alert before you release goods

A screenshot is not the money. Neither is an SMS. Here is how the three common fake alerts work, what stops each one, and the rule to give your attendant.

Published 5 October 2026

The alert is not the money

A customer picks what she wants. She taps at her phone for a while, turns the screen round, and there it is: transfer successful, your account number, the right amount, today's date. The goods go out. The money never comes.

This keeps working because people check the wrong thing.

The message is on their phone. The money is in your bank.

Only one of those is yours, and only one of them can be checked. Everything below follows from that.

Three ways it is done

The amounts in these examples are made up. The methods are not.

1. The receipt was made, not sent

There are services that sell fake receipts the way a printer sells letterheads. In September 2026, SaharaReporters published an investigation into one of them, a platform that generates receipts and notifications styled after widely used payment apps. According to that investigation, the reporter generated a receipt while no money moved into the real account, and found it difficult to tell the generated receipt from a genuine one. The report says one of the imitated brands examined the site and found elements impersonating it.

The investigation also reports what the service charges: points sold at a little over one naira each, with a minimum purchase of ₦1,500. At that rate, a convincing receipt is a very cheap thing to buy, and cloth is not. That is the whole economics of this fraud, and it is why the old test — let me see the receipt — stopped working.

2. The small one is real, the big one is not

The customer owes ₦300,000. He genuinely sends ₦5,000, and shows you a message for the other ₦295,000. Your own phone buzzes with a real alert for the small amount, and that real alert does the work: it buys the second message a trust it never earned. You saw your bank's own notification. You relax.

What catches this is counting money, not messages. Two transfers for one sale is perfectly normal — bank limits force honest customers to split large payments every day. What is never normal is one amount you can see in your account plus one amount you were shown on somebody's screen.

3. The credit arrives and is taken back

This one is different, and it is worth being honest about how it works. Money can land in your account and leave again: a payment app that posts a credit before it has settled, a duplicate or mistaken posting a bank later corrects, a deposit that has not actually cleared. The customer may not have forged anything at all.

It is rarer than the other two. It is also the one you cannot beat by waiting a few minutes, because a reversal can arrive hours later. For a very large sale to somebody you do not know, the answer is not a longer stare at your balance — it is cash, or your own POS terminal, or releasing the goods in parts as the money settles.

The check that stops the first two

There is only one rule, and it fits on a line: the money is in your own account, on your own phone, in full, before anything leaves the shop. Everything else is how to do that properly.

1. Do not look at the customer's phone. Whatever is on it, it is not evidence. Be polite about it and look at your own.
2. Open your own bank app. If the network is too slow, your bank's balance code will give you a figure over USSD — but it is only a figure, with no detail behind it, so for a large sale it is worth getting to the app.
3. Read the balance you could actually spend, not a pending line and not the ledger figure. The wording differs between apps; the question does not.
4. Account for every naira. If you are owed ₦300,000, you need to see ₦300,000 arrive, whether that comes as one credit or three. Credits you can see all count. A message you were shown counts for nothing.
5. If you cannot see your own account, you cannot say the money has landed. Then the goods wait. A customer who has really paid will wait ten minutes. That is the whole test, and it is free.

The person this actually happens to

Most fake alerts never reach you. They reach your attendant — on a Saturday, with three people waiting, in front of a customer who is loud, in a hurry, and offended at being doubted. She is being asked to call a customer a liar, alone, in front of a queue.

She is not the weak point. Being alone with the decision is the weak point. So take the decision off her and put it on the shop.

If it has already happened

General information for traders, not banking or legal advice. What your own bank tells you comes first.

If you were shown a forged receipt, no transfer was ever made. The reference number on it traces to nothing, and there is no receiving bank to chase, so a call to your bank will not find anything to find. What is worth something is what you can still gather while it is fresh: who the person was, who else saw them, what your cameras hold, what your own records say went out and at what time. Report it to the police if the amount is large, and tell your market association — the same face usually goes to several shops in a week.

If a credit was real and then went, that one your bank can look at. Call them the same day with the date, the amount and the reference, put it in writing so there is a record with a time on it, and ask them what they can do with the sending bank. Acting in the first hour occasionally gets money stopped before it is moved on. After that it almost never does — not because reporting late is useless, but because the chance drops away quickly.

Questions traders ask

My customer says his bank limit won't let him send the whole amount at once. Is that a trick?

Usually not. Daily and per-transfer limits on Nigerian banking apps are often lower than a large cloth sale, so honest customers split payments all the time. The rule is not how many transfers there are. The rule is that you can see every naira of it in your own account before anything leaves the shop.

Is a POS payment or a cash deposit slip safer than a transfer?

Cash counted in your hand is the only payment nobody can pull back, which is why it is worth asking for on a very large sale from somebody you do not know. A POS receipt is reasonable evidence because the terminal is yours, not the customer's. A deposit slip from a bank is not the same thing as money in your account, and should be treated like a transfer: check your own balance.

A customer I have known for years is insulted that I am checking. What do I say?

That you check everybody, which is true, and that it takes two minutes. The shops that lose money are the ones where the rule has exceptions, because the exception is exactly what a thief spends weeks earning. A good customer would rather be in a shop that cannot be cheated.

It happened while I was away and my attendant had already let the goods go. What now?

Deal with the money first and the blame later, if at all. Find out what she was shown and whether anybody got a name, a number or a face. Then look at whether she was ever given a rule she could point at, because a shop with no written rule has not been robbed of its goods so much as of its position.

Can an app confirm a payment for me?

Not for your bank account. Your bank is the only place that knows what has actually landed, and that is between you and your bank. What software can do is make sure the goods are not released until you say the money has landed, so the decision sits with you rather than with whoever is at the counter.