My Closest Friend Scammed Our Entire Friend Group

Chioma* (23) believed her friendship with Rachel* (23) was built on love and understanding. However, after repeated inconsistencies in how Rachel spent money, Chioma slowly realised her friend’s intentions weren’t as pure as she’d thought.

In this story, Chioma recounts how Rachel quietly scammed her over the years, how she tried to take out a loan in Chioma’s name behind her back, and why — despite this being the worst betrayal Chioma had ever gone through — she still forgave Rachel in the end.

This is Chioma’s story, as told to Azara.

In 2023, the person I considered my closest friend tried to take a loan from my account behind my back.

You can’t imagine what it was like to have discovered that while studying for an important test.

An email notification popped up on my laptop mid-study, and I had to stop everything to see who had tried to steal ₦15k from a broke 20-year-old third-year student.

It wasn’t a random thief or a stranger. It was my friend, Rachel.

I met Rachel three years before that incident, and up until then, she was one of my favourite people in the entire world.

We met the way most people in university do: in class. To be honest, that’s how my main friend group formed. We all happened to sit beside each other, and we made each other laugh, Rachel more than the rest.

She was funny, and I liked funny people. But beyond that, she seemed generous. She was the only one of us living off campus at the time, and every morning she greeted us with homemade cupcakes—something we couldn’t easily get in the hostel. I remember times when she offered to get me things or helped me with schoolwork, even when I didn’t ask.

We became friends quickly. She was just so friendly and fit into our group. When she finally moved on campus a few months later and joined the same hostel my friends and I stayed in, we felt complete.

But I would be lying if I said things were perfect.

Rachel was struggling, or at least, that’s what she told us. She talked a lot about her abusive father and how part of that abuse was withholding money. She would spend days crying to us, saying he only gave her a ₦5k monthly allowance. She even showed me an alert that confirmed this once.

But then the story would shift depending on her mood. Sometimes, she would tell us he sent her ₦100k a week, or that he was a millionaire with two houses. I should have suspected something was wrong, but I brushed it off as her just getting excited and telling stories.

I also brushed off the fact that she often asked for money. It was usually small amounts; ₦2k to pay for snacks here, ₦3k to pay for her food there. She would follow anyone who was buying something, claim her card wasn’t working or that she hadn’t brought it, and then ask them to pay, promising to pay it back. She never did.

“My bank transfers aren’t working.” She would lie if we asked for the money she owed. “I don’t have network. I’ll transfer later.” She would promise, until “later” became never.

She once said she went to the bank, where they showed her a list of all the transfers she’d made that hadn’t worked, so she had to approve them there.

Those “approved transfers” never went through.

We let it go because these weren’t big purchases, but looking back, maybe that emboldened her to do worse.

Rachel once lied to a friend that she was selling jeans. This friend paid her ₦20,000, but Rachel never delivered the jeans. She borrowed ₦10,000 from another friend when they went to a movie and used it to pay for two tickets. Another time, she promised to get a friend a ₦5,000 dress for a birthday, but the day passed, and no dress arrived.

She also scammed school staff. She would buy things at our hostel shop on credit and lie to me that she had paid for them. But when I went to do my own shopping, the woman at the counter would beg me to talk to Rachel, saying she had even blocked her because she kept asking for her money.

There was always an excuse; either there was a transfer error, or her bank was terrible. It was never Rachel’s fault.

Still, I believed her. She was good at using her alleged trauma to sway you, and at the time, I’d believed things simply didn’t work out for her. How was I supposed to keep asking for money from someone with an abusive father, or — as she’d once told us — someone with diabetes “in the red zone” who needed extra money to specialise her diet? In hindsight, I never saw her take medicine or actually change her eating habits.

I must have been naive because by 2023, animosity had spread through the friend group without my knowledge, and it all came to light over a hoodie.

A friend was having a birthday, and Rachel had volunteered to have a specialised hoodie made for her. Excitedly, we all sent Rachel between ₦2,000 and ₦3,000. Altogether, we gave Rachel about ₦15k to pay for this hoodie.

But weeks passed, and every time someone followed up, Rachel would get sad and say that the Instagram vendor had scammed her, that she was begging the woman to return the money, and that she didn’t know what to do.

Some of my friends got fed up and begged her to tell the truth, but Rachel stuck to her story.

Eventually, my friend’s birthday passed, and in anger, she messaged the Instagram vendor Rachel claimed had scammed her, but the confused seller said Rachel had inquired about buying a hoodie and then never followed up. She even took a screenshot of their chat, which proved she’d never been sent any money.

I didn’t know any of this was going on until my roommate sat me down that night and explained that Rachel was a thief and a liar.

Rachel? My Rachel? Who always seemed eager to help and opened up to everyone with so much ease? I believed my roommate, but still, still, I wanted to give grace.

At this point, Rachel had gone home for the weekend, and the tension in our friend group had escalated to the point where people were blocking her. We needed a spokesperson to confront her, so I was assigned the duty.

At first, I tried to understand her, but Rachel maintained her innocence and claimed people were just not being nice.

Around this time, I got an email saying she’d been trying to take a loan from me.

Shock does not do justice to what I felt. I had a test to think about, all my friends were mad at her, and here I was, trying to be the voice of understanding. Yet, that girl was actively trying to steal from me.

I only found out because she had logged into her email on my laptop and didn’t log out. I saw that she’d tried to secure the ₦15k loan from my bank account, but it didn’t work because she didn’t know my PIN.

Numbly, I packed up my laptop, left the library and walked to my hostel.

I showed my roommate the email, and everything fell apart.

When I texted Rachel to ask her about the loan, she pretended like she didn’t know what I was talking about. Only after I showed her the email did she start begging. She said she just needed money because people were angry at her for the other loans she had, and that it was the devil.

At the same time, another friend, who Rachel owed ₦20,000, was asking for her money. Rachel sent her a picture of an ATM stand, claiming she was trying to send the money. My friend thought the picture seemed fishy.

Sure enough, after a Google reverse image search, we discovered Rachel had gotten the picture from the internet.

Everyone was enraged. We created a group and a spreadsheet to tally up all the money she owed us. Aside from the snacks, the staff debt, and other scams we didn’t know about, Rachel owed us ₦65k.

I’d never been so hurt in my life, and I never felt more like a fool. How could I have been the last to see this happening?

The next day — the day before our test — 12 of us gathered Rachel in a classroom for what was meant to be a peaceful intervention. But as we started talking, we learnt that scamming wasn’t her only crime.

She lied about all of us. Sometimes, she would use one friend’s name to cover up a scam she committed against another.

One girl in particular, Hamzat*, wasn’t even part of our group, but Rachel went to complain to her that we were ganging up on her and wanted to hurt her. On the flip side, Rachel told us this same Hamzat had sex with strangers on her prayer mat and was trying to pimp her (Rachel) out to older men.

When Hamzat saw us that day and confronted us, the truth came flying out, shattering the idea of a “peaceful” intervention.

People were yelling and threatening Rachel. Hamzat nearly slapped her, and it got so bad that the school security had to separate us.

In the end, we told Rachel that she either repaid all she owed us or we would take the matter to student affairs.

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To cut a long story short, she got her aunt to settle the loans. She tried to apologise, but by this point, everyone was fed up. Not only did she refuse to take full accountability, but she also went as far as telling curious strangers that 40 of us ganged up on her and beat her up.

My response to her apology text was that she was a bitch who would burn in hell.

The story spread throughout the school, and by the end of the school year, nearly everyone was aware of it.

It was an odd rest of the school year. Most days, I woke up enraged, thinking of how Rachel had played in my face. On other days, I felt sad for her. How could she have fallen so low?

We all graduated and left school in 2024.

Today, I’m still friends with that friend group. I love them to bits, but I still felt a lot of anger toward Rachel that I needed to let go of. And so, sometime last year, I reached out to her.

I asked if she was okay, and I told her that I’d let go of what happened between us. Minutes later, she responded, saying she was sorry and wished she could’ve apologised in person.

Because of this, and because so much time had passed, I let it go. I do hope she’s okay and has worked through whatever issues she has.

Oh, and by the way, I did pass that test.

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