The address did not exist.
I mean that literally. I took a bus from Ajah roundabout, walked the last stretch in afternoon heat that was pressing down on the corrugated rooftops like something with a personal grudge, found the street the Instagram page had named in its highlights, and stood there for eleven minutes looking at a stretch of land with weeds growing chest-high and a hand-painted sign advertising a different property entirely from a different company that had nothing to do with the development I was looking for. I called the number on the Instagram page. It rang. Nobody answered. I called again the next day. The number was no longer reachable. The page itself was gone by Friday.
The woman who had sent me there in the first place had already paid three million naira.
Her name is Folake. She is thirty-one, works in logistics, saved for two years with the specific intention of making her first property investment before she turned thirty-two, which she had decided was some kind of deadline she had set for herself the way Lagos people set deadlines, with total seriousness and not enough information. She found the developer on Instagram through a post that had been shared by someone she followed, a lifestyle account she trusted because the person behind it seemed to have good taste in restaurants and reasonable opinions about traffic. The developer’s page had a clean aesthetic. Render images of apartments with large windows and the kind of warm interior lighting that makes everything look like a life you want. Testimonial videos. A countdown to the next payment tranche closing. Eleven thousand followers.
She did not verify the company registration. She did not visit the site before paying. She transferred the money in two tranches because the page said the early-bird window was closing and she did not want to miss it. The second tranche cleared on a Tuesday. By Thursday, the page had stopped responding to DMs. By the following Monday, it was gone.
I want to be direct about something that the property industry in Lagos will not say publicly because it implicates too many people who are currently making money. The Instagram developer scam is not primarily a technology problem. It is a trust infrastructure problem, and that infrastructure has been deliberately kept weak because a housing market with proper verification systems, proper escrow requirements, proper consequences for fraudulent listings, would also be a market where many currently legitimate operators would have to change how they work. The chaos that allows a ghost developer to steal three million naira from Folake is the same chaos that allows a real developer to accept payment for a building that will take four years longer than promised and look nothing like the render. The victims are different but the system is the same system.
What changed my thinking, genuinely shifted something for me, was not Folake’s story, as painful as it was to sit across from her at a place near the Ajah market and watch her reconstruct the sequence of decisions that led to that empty plot. What shifted things was when I started looking at the comment sections of legitimate developers’ pages and noticed that the language, the urgency framing, the countdown timers, the testimonial format, the render aesthetic, was essentially identical to the fraudulent ones. There is no visual grammar that separates a scam from a real offer in this market because the real market has adopted every single technique of the scam market and dressed it in a business registration number that may or may not be verifiable depending on how motivated you are to check.
Most first-time buyers are not lazy. They are trusting the wrong signals. They check how many followers the page has instead of checking if the company has a physical office they can visit unannounced. They watch the testimonial videos without asking why every person in every video looks like they were filmed in the same week with the same ring light. They feel the urgency of the closing window without asking who benefits from that urgency, because the answer, always, is the seller, not the buyer.
I have spoken with two agents in this corridor who told me, separately and without knowing they were echoing each other, that the buyers most likely to be scammed are the ones who are most emotionally ready to buy. The readiness is the vulnerability. When someone has been saving and waiting and planning, they do not want friction. They want the thing they have been waiting for to finally be real. The scammer understands this better than the buyer does.
Before you transfer anything to any developer you found on social media, go to the Corporate Affairs Commission website and confirm the company exists. Then go to the site address in person, unannounced, in daylight. If the developer is real, they will not be offended. If they are offended, that is your answer before it costs you anything.
Lukmon Isiaq is a Lagos-based property researcher and street-level writer who has spent years studying the Ajah corridor the way most people never bother: on foot, in compounds, and in conversation with landlords, tenants, caretakers, and estate agents who operate where the listings end and the real story begins.
He is not a property developer. He is not a real estate marketer. He is the person you call before you sign anything. The one who has personally walked flood-prone streets after October rain, argued with agents over undisclosed charges, and documented how the Lagos housing market actually works for ordinary Nigerians trying to make serious decisions with serious money.
His writing on Abraham Adesanya Estate Lekki Ajah covers the Ajah corridor, Ikota Villa, Ajao Estate, Ogudu GRA, and the wider Lekki property market with one consistent standard: the honest version, not the brochure version.
He understands the gap between what a listing promises and what a tenant discovers on their first rainy season.
