"They say money is neutral. But when it comes soaked in blood, it always leaves a stain."
The first time Jude made ₦150,000 in one night, he didn't feel guilty.
He felt powerful.
It wasn't from a job. No office. No boss. No ID card.
It came from a laptop, a VPN, and a fake business invoice sent to a foreign company looking to "outsource" IT services. The scam was quick, surgical. The victim wired the money. Jude closed the wallet before morning.
He used half the cash to pay for his mother's burial.
The other half?
He used it to eat like a human being for the first time in months.
Jude hadn't planned to become a cybercriminal.
He had started with innocent intentions: crypto forums, data scraping, online business models. He was just a brilliant boy in a broken country — trying to escape the same fate that killed his father.
But every door he knocked on needed money first.
Pay for a certificate.
Pay for a mentor.
Pay for exposure.
So when a dark web contact named "PhantomX" offered him $500 to generate fake bank statements for a politician's visa application — he didn't hesitate.
After all, the politician was already rich.
What harm could one more lie do?
Three months later, Jude had built a small empire:
Burner phones.
Ghost accounts.
Cleaners who turned crypto to cash through betting sites and gift card laundering.
Politicians and pastors who called him "a genius" in secret — and "a fraudster" in public.
He bought a car. Then an apartment.
He started wearing suits.
But the money came with rules.
Unspoken ones.
Never expose the real clients.
Never get emotional.
And never believe you're irreplaceable.
Jude broke the second rule first.
It started with a girl.
Her name was Zina — a final-year med student who thought he was just a smart tech consultant. She liked him for his mind. They shared books, dreams, and one night — truth.
"I scam people," he said bluntly, watching her reaction.
She didn't flinch.
"Why?"
He told her everything — the hospital, his father, the hunger, the deals.
Zina didn't scream or slap him. She just said something that stuck like a scar:
"Just don't lose the reason you started."
For a while, he didn't.
He started donating anonymously — paying tuition for kids in Ajegunle, funding free Wi-Fi for schools, building wells in rural villages. It didn't clean the money. But it soothed his conscience.
Until one day, Zina disappeared.
He searched everywhere.
Found nothing.
Then, a message came from PhantomX.
"You got sloppy. Next time, don't confess to liabilities."
There was no proof Zina was harmed. But no trace she was safe either.
Jude lost it.
He tried pulling out of the network.
PhantomX sent him a photo — his mother's grave, freshly dug up.
"Nobody leaves. You keep feeding the system, or the system feeds on you."
That was the day Jude changed.
He no longer cared about giving back.
He wanted to burn the entire system down.
He stopped laundering for clients. Instead, he started collecting their secrets.
He hacked shell companies. Planted trackers in fake donations. Cloned entire bank networks.
What he found was bigger than fraud.
It was a country built on blood money.
Politicians funding terrorism with campaign donations.
Judges paid in crypto to throw out human rights cases.
NGOs stealing aid money to buy Range Rovers.
Churches laundering billions through "crusade expenses."
Jude downloaded it all.
And waited.
Now, years later, as he stared at Tonia Wale's media empire and watched Dr. Kelvin Dairo's reputation burn, Jude smiled.
It was almost time.
His enemies had always used lies to control the world.
Now he would use truth as a weapon.
The kind of truth backed by bank records, voice recordings, contracts, emails — the kind no one could bury.
But he knew the price of what he was about to do.
They would come for him.
They'd call him a terrorist.
A traitor.
A criminal.
But none of that mattered anymore.
His blood was already on the money.
Might as well make it count.