Mobile application Kled on Tuesday announced its removal from the Nigerian app store and banned its Internet Protocol from the country.

The mobile app in a statement stated that although Nigerians were among the earliest adopters of the app, the ban became imperative after 95 percent of fraudulent activities on the platform were linked users from Nigeria.

The firm said, “We have removed Kled from the Nigerian app store and IP banned the entire region. The first thing I would like to say is I have nothing against Nigeria. I have a ton of friends from this region and these were some of our earliest app adopters. Genuinely, thank you all for the support.

“Kled has been up and running and out of beta for four months now. We have paid out hundreds of thousands of people for their data, and our users have uploaded over one billion assets onto our platform.

“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.”

The data-focused app, which compensates users for uploading assets, disclosed that, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, recorded less than 10 per cent fraud rate across 10 times the userbase size.

It added that, “Our fraud system is fast to catch these issues but the level of complexity of these schemes is getting out of hand. This weekend we were flooded with thousands of fake Japanese passports and identity cards with Nigerians photoshopped onto them in our KYC system. 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 and banning system to quickly filter out bad actors when the time is right.”

Responding to those requesting for the app to be restored in the region, the app stated that the fraudulent activities on its platform in Nigeria, has “gotten out of hand,” adding  that, “we hope to return when the time is right.”