Nigeria's digital payment revolution has a shadow side, and the Central Bank has now quantified exactly how large it is.
Banks and their customers lost a combined ₦134.48 billion to fraud between 2020 and 2025, according to data contained in the CBN's Nigeria Payments System Vision 2028 document. Attempted fraud across the banking and payments ecosystem amounted to ₦187.79 billion during the six years, while actual losses stood at ₦134.48 billion.
The losses were recorded across multiple payment channels, including over-the-counter transactions, ATMs, cheques, e-commerce platforms, internet banking, mobile banking, Point of Sale terminals, and web channels, highlighting the growing challenge of safeguarding Nigeria's increasingly digital financial system.
The trajectory of losses tells a story of accelerating vulnerability. Fraud losses rose steadily from ₦11.61 billion in 2020 to ₦12.77 billion in 2021 and ₦14.32 billion in 2022. The figure increased further to ₦17.67 billion in 2023 before surging sharply to ₦52.26 billion in 2024, the highest annual loss recorded during the period.
The 2024 spike requires specific context. The sharp increase in fraud losses in 2024 was largely driven by a major internal fraud case involving ₦30 billion. "Fraud amounts in Internet Banking, Mobile, and POS channels declined, yet overall losses rose by 196%, primarily due to a major internal case involving ₦30bn. Web fraud incidents also increased by 169%," the CBN stated.
Fraud losses rose by 23% in 2023, largely due to a spike in e-commerce-related fraud cases, which escalated by 1,961%. Mobile, POS, and web channels recorded moderate increases in the same period.
The 2025 data, however, offers genuine encouragement. Both attempted fraud and actual losses declined in 2025, falling to ₦37.57 billion attempted and ₦25.85 billion actually lost, respectively. The CBN attributed the improvement to stricter regulations, increased industry cooperation, enhanced prevention strategies, and stronger implementation of fraud controls across the system, noting that electronic payment fraud declined by 51% in 2025.
That progress, however, is being tested by a rapidly expanding attack surface. Electronic fraud losses have risen almost tenfold in six years, with annual losses now exceeding ₦1 trillion when broader measures are applied, bringing Nigeria close in value to the UK's 2024 fraud losses of £700 million.
Analysts have called for an upgrade from two-factor to three-factor authentication across the banking system, noting that the CBN last enforced a major fraud-control framework in 2015, while cybercrime has evolved rapidly in the decade since.
The CBN, for its part, is already moving. It has directed NIBSS to debit institutions that receive proceeds from fraudulent transactions, tightened onboarding requirements to include mandatory liveness verification and device-binding measures, and is increasingly mandating banks to use artificial intelligence to monitor transactions in real time. Whether the 51% improvement in 2025 signals a genuine turning point or simply a pause in a longer escalation cycle remains the question that six more years of data will answer.
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