Paternity fraud in Nigeria

Paternity fraud in Nigeria is the pretence that a Nigerian father is the legitimate and biological father of a child. It usually occurs when a woman deliberately misidentifies a man as the biological and legitimate father of her child.[1] This fraudulent act led the man to believe a biological connection with a child of another man and sometimes remain undetected for several years. In most cases, women are often aware that the presumed biological father is not genetically linked with the child. A DNA expert from Lagos University Teaching Hospital claimed that 30% of the Nigerian men who went to paternity testing centers (paternity testing laboratories) were not the biological fathers of the children in their custody.[2] However, samples drawn from paternity testing laboratories are not representative of a given general population, and are many times more likely to contain instances of paternity fraud than a random sample from the populations from which they are drawn. Similarly, two large samples from paternity testing laboratories drawn from Sweden and from a white American group from Los Angeles found paternity fraud (or "non-paternity") rates of 38.7% and 24.9% respectively, although "non-paternity" rates in the general populations are much lower.[3][4]