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On Nigerian Twitter, sports betting often dominates the conversation, and on May 26, 2026, it did so in spectacular fashion. A punter known as “39 billion” turned a ₦90 ($0.06) slip into a ₦200 million ($140k) payout, and by the next morning the win was everywhere. Meme pages, betting Telegram groups, even pop‑culture accounts that rarely touch gambling content were all talking about it.
The odds told the story: 226,147, a multiple stacked so high that seasoned bettors saved screenshots in disbelief. The story and slip have gathered over 21 million views on X (formerly Twitter) alone.
Universe I dropped it here! pic.twitter.com/y3fbAUEp0W
— 39 (@39billion) May 26, 2026
But this was not the first time. Nigeria’s betting scene produces a version of this story every few months. A punter, a wild acca, a headline‑grabbing payout, and each time it follows the same cycle: thousands of followers chasing the next tip, paying to join Telegram and WhatsApp channels for exclusives, and chasing a repeat that statistically almost never comes.
What’s less visible, until now, is what happens to the people who actually follow these tips.
A team of Nigerian researchers, Kayode Makinde, Frances Adelakun, and Oluwatimileyin Onasanya, tracked more than 5,000 pre‑match bets worth about ₦6.5 billion ($4.8 million) from some of the country’s biggest influencers.
The combined win rate across all those bets: 10.39%.
The rest of the picture, what those returns meant for anyone staking alongside the tips, is where the story gets worse.
The Business Behind the Slip
One part that most followers never think about is the fact that tipsters don’t actually need their bets to win before they make money. Almost all of them make their money from affiliate deals, not their daily tips.
Betting platforms pay them a cut of whatever their followers stake through their link, whether that bet wins or loses. Sometimes, they even get paid a fixed amount every month, with one tipster confirming in 2025 to BusinessDay NG that his monthly take-home was around a million Naira($700).
So the more people betting, the more often, the bigger stakes, the more the tipster earns. A losing slip sometimes even pays more than a winning one, as long as you clicked the link and placed the bet.
This is why winnings get posted and paraded the second they land, while losses hardly ever hit your timeline. Many don’t really know how big these losses are and how frequently they happen. Makinde and his co-authors put real numbers on how bad that gap actually is.
The three tipsters they tracked, @mrbanks, @louiedi13, and @bossolamilekan1, all lost money on their own bets. Mr Banks, the biggest of the three with over two million followers on X, lost over a quarter of everything he staked. Followers who copied the tips exactly did worse, losing 38% on average. So for every ₦100,000 wagered on his tips, bettors lost ₦38,000.
It also didn’t matter which tipster you followed. Statistically, there was no real difference between them. The “best” one and the “worst” one both left you in the red. Even smarter betting didn’t save anyone either. The researchers tested four different staking strategies, from flat bets to more careful, odds-adjusted ones.
The bets that felt the most exciting, with slips promising 100x returns or more, the kind that go viral because the numbers look insane, wiped out 74% of whatever was staked on them, on average.
In total, they tracked 5,467 from these three tipsters, covering about ₦6.5 billion ($4.8 million) in combined stakes. Out of all those slips, only 568 won.
A Generation Betting on Itself
Nigeria is young, with over 60% of the population under 30, according to the National Population Commission. The generation, which grew up with betting shops on almost every street, also saw the rise of online betting sites as part of daily life.
The numbers underline how far this has affected the populace. Last year, Emomotimi Agama, Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, pointed out that over 60 million Nigerians gamble on any given day, spending an estimated ₦7.4 billion ($5.5 million). So you have more people putting money into betting slips than into the stock market, and the numbers are nowhere near close.
Even worse, a large chunk of the population no longer sees gambling as something casual. Research from the Nigerian Journal of Social Psychology put the share of active gamblers who meet the clinical criteria for problem gambling at close to 28%. This means that for every four Nigerians who bet regularly, one is doing so in a way that’s already causing them harm.
This is the audience social media tipsters are actually speaking to. Not casual bettors looking for a bit of weekend fun, but a generation that’s slowly coming to terms with gambling as the only path to fast money and watching people who look like them post proof that a shortcut exists. And in most cases, they follow blindly, without knowing the odds are heavily stacked against them. iGamingToday reached out to Kayode Makinde about what surprised him most during the research.
“Honestly, the overall results were surprising, none of the influencers were profitable,” he stated. “What stood out most was the flat-stake capital loss of -38.3%, because that’s the number that covers everything: it’s what a follower actually walks away with if they follow the tips directly, stake for stake. It shows their ‘big boom’ wins simply aren’t enough to cover the losses underneath them.”
But this setup is not new; tipster and influencer marketing has been leading gambling advertising in Nigeria for years, from Facebook groups to Telegram channels and now, its newest and possibly biggest form yet, X. The main question is whether anyone is actually doing something about it.
What Other Countries Are Doing, And What Nigeria Isn’t
Nigeria isn’t alone in dealing with this, and it isn’t leading the response either. Kenya made headlines in May 2025 when it became one of the first African countries to ban celebrity and influencer gambling endorsements. The now-defunct Betting Control and Licensing Board (BCLB) had to suspend gambling ads for 30 days to figure out how bad the problem actually was.
As one would expect, creators in Kenya pushed back and called it heavy-handed, but the regulator didn’t back down. While the ban didn’t completely destroy the referral pipeline, with tipsters moving to private Telegram channels, Signal groups, and WhatsApp networks, the reduced visibility is set to have an impact on coming generations at the very least.
Nigeria, on the other hand, doesn’t really have laws that cover this.
The Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) was built for TV and billboards, not for an X or WhatsApp post. It covers how close gambling ads can be to schools, the messages that can be passed, but barely anything on affiliate marketing or disclosure. The FCCPA is also supposed to protect people from exactly this kind of exploitation, but it’s built to react to complaints, and almost nobody who loses money on a bad tip files one.
A regulatory system built around complaints doesn’t do much for harm that the person experiencing it doesn’t recognize as harm.
Makinde, like many others, thinks the fix should start somewhere specific. His research pointed to a couple of recommendations, including an urgent need for better public financial literacy, but he believes transparency should lead the way.
“If I had to pick one thing for regulators to act on first, it’s disclosure of the affiliate relationship,” he said to iGT. “These tipsters are paid on how much their followers wager, not on whether the tips win. Right now that’s invisible to the follower. A basic ‘I earn commission when you bet’ disclosure would change how people weigh these recommendations overnight.”
It’s a fair ask when you consider what’s actually happening underneath it. Not a ban, not a crackdown, at least not yet, just the truth, stated plainly before someone puts money behind a stranger’s prediction.
Until regulators on both federal and state levels catch up, the cycle Makinde’s data exposed will keep playing out in plain sight. Another slip will go viral. Another wave of new followers will click the link, hoping to be the next and most of them, the data already says, will lose.
The unlucky ones might never realize and keep chasing that high they ever experienced themselves, contributing to the ever-rising problem gambling crisis in the country. And nobody will post a screenshot of that.
