Mallick Bolakale laughed as he took me back to the early 2010s, when buying items from eBay in Nigeria required navigating an underground system.
Then, a Nigerian needed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to create an encrypted address and a broker with a foreign bank card and a shipping address in the United States to order items from the online marketplace, he recalled.
Buyers would first send money to the broker’s naira account; the broker would convert it to dollars and pay for the item with his foreign card. The broker would then receive the items at his address before arranging their shipment to Nigeria.
Bolakale, who at the time was studying law while repairing and reselling gadgets on the side to save money for law school, helped people buy electronics from eBay. Then he decided to risk the ₦500,000 (about $3,000 at the time) he had saved for law school.
He used the money to buy gadgets like laptops from eBay, hoping to resell them at a profit before school resumed. The process worked the same way it always had until a friend, using his laptop, refreshed the eBay page without turning on a VPN.
