While the group offers no protection for its members, it utilises Telegram’s privacy features extensively to protect itself.
On the day I met 26-year-old Shola (not real name), she had just arrived at a popular hotel in Ogba, a suburban area of Lagos, to engage in prostitution. Her prostitution journey started on Telegram in 2023. A friend had introduced her to a prostitution group on the platform, and by April 2025, Shola had become a full-time prostitute. Prostitution, also called ‘hookup’ in Nigeria, is the exchange of sexual activity for money.
The hotel where I met Shola allows prostitutes to operate freely in the corridors of their ground floor as well as in the club. Their business strategy was simple. The men would spend money on the prostitutes to buy drinks in the club, and to lodge at the hotel later on for coitus. A double money-win. The global sex industry is estimated to generate $186 billion annually, with Nigeria accounting for about 6.45 per cent of the revenue.
Shola appears to be popular at the hotel. Everyone calls her, waiting to speak to her. Within minutes of entering the hotel, Shola is already with a male client. She sat next to him in the hotel’s club in silence, with bottles of beer in front of them, a cigarette in each hand, and the club’s music blasting over their heads.
I sat at a distance, not too far away from Shola, at the club. A friend had introduced me to her earlier in the night, and we had exchanged phone numbers. We began to chat on WhatsApp about her experience with prostitution on Telegram while she was sitting next to her client. Occasionally, the conversation switches to a physical one.
Shola mainly gets her clients from a private Telegram prostitution group called “Obawole, Ogba, and Iju Ishaga,” punctuated with rose emojis. Unlike other prostitution groups that use keywords such as “hookup” to indicate they facilitate prostitution, the group carries no such signal.
The group’s name is that of an area within the Ifako-Ijaiye and Ikeja local government areas of Lagos State. The areas are not far apart, and the purpose of the group on Telegram is to connect prostitutes with clients living along the same axis.
The group is also private, so without insider information, you might never know it exists. Telegram allows people to create private groups with up to 200,000 members and let users share an unlimited number of photos, videos, and files up to 2 GB each. The cloud-based app was created by siblings Pavel and Nikolai Durov and launched in August 2013. As of 2025, it already has over 1 billion monthly active users. The platform offers features such as end-to-end encryption, hidden phone numbers, and bot integration. These privacy-enhanced features made it possible for prostitution groups like Obawole Ogba and Iju Ishaga to hide in plain sight.
Shola helped me join the Telegram prostitution group and showed me how to get clients as she does, collecting my phone, and muttering the words she was typing on my behalf in the group:
“I am available for any short rest and overnight with BJ (Blow job meaning oral sex),” Shola said as she asked me with a raised eyebrow if I knew how to do BJ, and I murmured in agreement. She sent the message on my behalf, assuring me I would soon begin to get clients. She was right. Sexual services requests soon began to pour in on my Telegram account, with some clients impatiently calling me.
Before ending our conversation, Shola warned me to be careful of an admin who extorts money from women. His name is Cattea.
Another prostitute I met at the hotel had told me about Cattea. She, too, only shared her first name and was in the prostitution group until Cattea blocked her for not paying “tithe.” Let’s call her Blessing. Blessing told me how she had paid Cattea N2,000 to become a verified prostitute in the group. She scrolls through her phone and shows me the receipt, desperate to prove that she was telling the truth.
She said it became a problem when Cattea began asking her for money consistently and threatened to mute her in the group. If he does that, she won’t be able to advertise her sexual services to get clients. She paid him N1,000 on two different occasions before deciding that she had had enough. Cattea blocked her from the group afterwards, her voice swelling in anger as she recounted her experience.
Like Blessing, Angel, a member of the Obawole, Ogba, Iju Ishaga group, has also had her share of extortion, but this time with other Telegram admins, not Cattea. Angel is in other groups that connect women to clients for prostitution within different areas of Lagos. The group facilitates prostitution in the highbrow areas of the city. Angel paid N10,000 to the admin to join the groups: @lekkibeach, @ibejuLekki, and @ajahconnect; however, she soon became a victim of extortion. Within a month, the group admin muted her and asked her to pay N70,000 to continue accessing the platform.
Angel told me that the admins running Telegram prostitution groups for some highbrow areas are likely a couple, and they extort people because they believe they are untouchable.
“It’s messing with my head, lately,” she said.
Aside from being extorted by admins, Angel has also been treated badly by clients she meets in Telegram groups. She has been body shamed, left stranded, and threatened with physical violence, adding to her distress. She recounted an experience in which she had taken a Bolt ride costing N30,000 to meet a client, only for him to never show up. Then there was a time she requested a potential client pay N250,000 for anal sex. The man compared her to a bag of bones and threatened to knock her on the head if he had met her.
But while women like Angel navigate the murky waters of prostitution on the Telegram groups, the admins are cashing out from owning and operating the accounts. Beyond extorting prostitutes for money, the admins require people to pay membership fees and increase prices at will. Although Angel had paid N10,000 to join @ajahconnect, when I tried to join the same group, the admin asked me to pay N35,000. Meanwhile, Ajah Connect has over 16,000 members.
With avenues for cash available from opening and managing Telegram prostitution groups, several other prostitution rings exist to facilitate operations across Nigeria, including universities. I counted 86 of such groups.
Some of the groups also migrated from WhatsApp to Telegram after being banned on the former. One such group is Olosho Connect Naija, where men beg to be sex slaves, and women advertise sex videos for cash. Some members also advertise porn stars’ opportunities and transgender sexual activities.
The admin manager, Henry Otareh, reveals that the group initially operated on WhatsApp but, after being taken down, now plans to become the number one prostitution-connecting group on Telegram and across Nigeria.
“We want people from at least every major city in Nigeria: Abuja, Lagos, PH, Asaba, Owerri, Enugu, Umuahia, Uyo, Calabar,” Henry says, begging members to make his pimp dream come true by sharing the group’s link with, “even those in minor towns and villages.”
Olosho Connect Naija has undergone several name changes before settling on the one that reflects the admin’s ambition.
But after deciding on its name, the group admin requires male members to pay N5,000 to his Opay account: 9159563993, while payments for prostitutes are to range from N3,000 to N20,000.
For women, they must be verified as prostitutes. To become verified, I shared my view-once picture and my age with June Din, the group’s owner. Five minutes later, with June utilising Telegram’s label feature, I was tagged a “verified escort.” This means that men can now trust that I am indeed a prostitute and patronise my sexual services.
I asked June what protection exists for women who are verified prostitutes, and she told me none.
“This is a hookup; nobody is guaranteeing you safety. You are meeting someone for the first time that you don’t know, so that’s the risk,” she told me in a voice note rather frankly, and tears involuntarily pooled in my eyes.
While the group offers no protection for its members, it utilises Telegram’s privacy features extensively to protect itself. The group makes it impossible for you to screen-grab, record, or copy information on a mobile phone. It also integrates Artificial Intelligence tools: ChatKeeperbot, which helps control spam messages, and Safeguard, an extensive security tool. During a private chat with a customer, if you attempt to take a screengrab, it announces it! Above all, there is no option for you to report the group. You can leave, but you can’t report.
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In Henry’s attempt to justify the existence of Olosho Connect Naija, he claimed in a voice note carrying the wave of his calm voice that “prostitution is the oldest profession in human history,” emphasising that “the group is here to stay.”
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