I spent the majority of my summer reading consumer fraud cases in the New York Attorney General’s Office. No case wasthe same, I read cases in every industry you could imagine: automobile, internet provision, entertainment, online delivery services, housing, and many more. Still, each case brought with it its own lessons to be learned which would often help in understanding a different case later on. These lessons could be in the form of deciding what rules apply, what agencies, if any, should be involved, what nuances in a case had not been considered, or how severe a fraudulent case is that it may need to be promoted for direct litigation.
Working in the consumer fraud department taught me a lot, particularly, the importance of the public sector in maintaining our economic system. Every new case represented a dissatisfied consumer or a transaction not fully complete. On the job, I realised that the work I did, in resolving Consumer Fraud cases, was a major avenue for preserving capitalist consumption. Capitalism is fundamentally as much a legal process as it is market-economic. To understand this more, consider how we own private property. Private ownership is a legally enshrined doctrine that allows individuals to exclude others from certain assets. We can transfer ownership of our private property to other individuals within the constraints of a (implied or expressed) contract. This is essentially Capitalism: owning and transferring property within a contract. Knowing this, it is easy to understand that the smooth preservation of our capitalist society is as much tied to litigation and negotiations of contracts as it is to market transactions. Accordingly, the consumer fraud department in the Attorney General’s office performs the crucial job of maintaining the integrity of these contracts, thereby, contributing to preserving capitalism.
Consequently, it is safe to say that without a functioning Consumer Frauds office capitalist consumption would be difficult: consumers would lose trust in the economic system; service providers, businesses and firms would have an undue advantage over consumers in transactions because (a) they possess superior bargaining power in the form of “means” and (b) they stand to gain more from fraudulence. the marketplace would fall into chaos where the price system is constantly negotiated and an informal knowledge market would develop. This situation would leave both consumers and service providers worse off.
What I have described above is reality for consumers in many African countries. There is already a dedicated body of scholarship that discusses the consequences of lacking consumer protection enforcement and weak public service departments in African countries.
Let us take a look at the consumer experience in Nigeria. In Nigeria The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) is the state regulator (the consumer fraud department) that promotes consumer protection and fights against fraud. Yet, financial fraud in Nigeria remains the order of day. The FCCPC does not even contain a mandate that outlines provisions for online consumer privacy and data protection. In our current AI dominated reality, this is a suicide sentence for consumers who use AI tools and other professional AI services in Nigeria.
In the weeks I worked at the AG’s office, I witnessed the New York office going directly after predatory companies, securing debt relief, uncovering price gouging networks, and so on. All with the primary goal of helping the people of the state of New York. This is not the same in Nigeria. Whereas the American consumer fraud apparatus has a predictable path: file a complaint, an investigator picks it up, an agency with subpoena power and litigation authority stands behind the process, and a resolution eventually arrives; that predictability is often lost in Nigeria. In Nigeria, the public service apparatus is a decayed industry, even those appointed to serve the people, end up committing most of the extortion. So the reality is, in America the state absorbs the cost of trust so the market doesn’t (always) have to. While in Nigeria there is no trust, rather, it is up to individuals to personally vet every party before transactions are made, and of course this has major repercussions for how business is conducted in the country.
Nigeria, like many other African countries, has institutions and legal mechanisms for handling consumer fraud. One example is the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) [already mentioned above]. However, the country is still yet to adequately catch up to the scale of the problem. For instance, in 2025, the FCCPC resolved 9,091 complaints and recovered more than ₦10 billion for consumers, showing some enforcement activity. However, data from Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) showed financial fraud cases still surged by 45% in a single year, with 70% of losses tied to digital channels, and separate estimates put cumulative fraud losses at about ₦320 billion between January 2023 and April 2025. The FCCPC is chasing a problem that’s growing faster than its capacity to resolve individual complaints, and, as I noted, it still has no clear mandate for online consumer privacy or data protection, which matters enormously now that AI-driven tools are becoming the interface for everyday transactions.
Nigeria has a public service problem that must be addressed. Consumer fraud continues to succeed not because there are no legal remedies for it in the country but because the country has failed to build the pipes that will direct the flood. The pipes being the enforcement capacity of oour public service departments; the predictable nature which — as I witnessed as an intern in NYC — is definitely achievable. Weak enforcement doesn’t just hurt individual consumers; it taxes the entire economy, because every business now has to consider the risk that its counterparties won’t be held accountable if something goes wrong.
So what can Nigeria and other Developing (African) countries to do?
In my time at the NY AG office, co-ordination between agencies was as smooth as butter. There was a centralized network for transferring cases when they exceeded our jurisdiction. And so, at the push of a button, I could generate a letter to transfer cases from the Attorney General to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or Housing agencies. This system eliminates the stress it takes on consumers to file new cases when a specific agency may not be able to attend to their unique case. For example, in Nigeria, I have mentioned that the The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) does not contain a mandate to protect consumers from online data fraud; however, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) does have this mandate. There should be a centralised system for transferring cases between these two agencies.
Additionally, scaling and funding is necessary. Most Nigerian public service work is understaffed and underfunded. Funding for enforcers in the public service allows them to perform their jobs without relying on bribes and other means of extortion. The current monthly salary sits for entry level staff sits at 230,000 naira ($167). Increasing the salary would also attract more talent to the public service and provide employment opportunities for Nigerian youth. We have seen recent similar (successful) plans within public agencies in Nigeria. In June, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) in collaboration with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) trained and certified 4000 new staff members. This is one of the factors that led to the NDPC to expand its regulatory reach and value Nigeria’s local data protection industry at ₦16.3 billion.
Finally, developing (African) countries need to make a commitment to enforcing regulations. Boamah et al (2012) highlight some of the most pertinent challenges that communities face in enforcing statutes and regulations. I think this paper is very relevant and can be extrapolated as a case study for many African countries as it includes more nuance than has been included in this essay, such as local or cultural resistance to enforcement, limited public knowledge, etc.