When a friend introduced Delali* to the dating app Grindr, she was wary. The 25-year-old Ghanaian-Nigerian chef knew online dating in Accra, Ghana’s capital, was treacherous for transgender women. Despite this, she decided to create a profile in February 2019. Messages started flooding in. One man caught her attention and they decided to meet up.
At the meeting place, he led her to a secluded building. Inside a room lit by a blue light, he locked the door. She sat, nervously waiting for him to make the first move. Suddenly, two people with torches appeared out of nowhere, filming her. “It felt like I was in a dream,” she says, recalling the realisation that something terrible was about to happen.
For the next three hours, Delali was beaten, insulted and humiliated. Her attackers stole her money and phone, threatening to expose her identity to her contacts and the police. “I had to endure the torture, the pain, everything they did to me.”
Delali is among hundreds of LGBTQ+ people in Ghana being targeted online by criminal gangs exploiting widespread homophobia and transphobia in the country. The targets – mainly gay men, bisexual men and trans women – are contacted through dating apps or other digital platforms by criminals pretending to be gay, and lured to isolated places where they are subjected to assault, robbery, blackmail and extortion.
A common tactic involves recording and sharing videos of the victims naked, and forcing confessions to blackmail them and incite further attacks on queer people. Videos are also a way for perpetrators to gain traffic online, says Ebenezer Peegah, director of the LGBTQ+ rights advocacy group Rightify Ghana.
Ghana’s parliament passed the human sexual rights and family values bill in February last year, after it received bipartisan support. Even though same-sex relations were already illegal, the new legislation prescribed harsher punishments for LGBTQ+ activities, including a three-year jail term for same-sex intercourse and up to 10 years’ imprisonment for producing, procuring or distributing materials deemed to promote homosexuality.
The former president Nana Akufo-Addo declined to assent to the law, citing legal challenges, but human rights activists say the attempt to introduce the “anti-gay bill” led to a sharp rise in homophobic violence. There was also a proliferation of disinformation while the bill was being debated.
A report published last month by Rightify Ghana said politicians used openly homophobic messaging during the 2024 presidential election to sway voters, heightening the climate of intolerance that the anti-gay bill had already fomented.
The bill was reintroduced in March this year.
Cases of attacks against LGBTQ+ people reported to Rightify Ghana rose to 300 in 2024, three times the number recorded the previous year, and continue to rise.
So far this year, more than 120 cases have been reported to Rightify, while two other local organisations have received more than 200, according to Peegah, who says the groups do not want to be named.
“These reported cases are just a fraction of what is happening because some victims don’t report their cases, and others don’t even know that there is help available,” he says.
Despite the scale of the attacks, most cases go unreported due to fear and stigma. According to reports by human rights groups, including Amnesty, and the US state department, survivors who manage to report are met with indifference by law enforcement agencies or even further intimidation and extortion by police officers.
“[These kind of attacks are] definitely becoming more prevalent,” says Wanlov the Kubolor, a musician and LGBTQ+ activist.
“Most Ghanaians are living on or below the poverty line. The queer community is a carte blanche for people who want to rob their fellow humans,” he says. “This is a way less dangerous way of making money for people who are already into criminal activity.”
The most common platforms used for luring people and further victimising them are Grindr, TikTok, Snapchat, Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp groups, survivors say. The hate campaigns persist on these platforms, despite flouting their community standards.
“It’s mostly Grindr,” says Kojo, a 31-year-old gay man who has survived at least two violent attacks through dating platforms. “Grindr is more anonymous. Nobody has their face on the platform.”
The gangs, typically consisting of two to 15 people, work systematically, establishing online contact, abusing victims, filming and posting the content. Rightify’s director has noted a “disturbing trend” of these gangs sharing a “playbook” with specific keywords.
A recent case involves a 14-year-old boy, known as Kofi, who was attacked and beaten by eight men who suspected he was gay. The video of the attack, in which he was forced to dance naked and sing “I am gay” in a local language, went viral on TikTok before being taken down.
Despite TikTok taking down the video, an audio version of the recording became a template sound for viral content on the platform.
Between 24 April and the end of May 2025, 12,400 pieces of content were created on TikTok from the audio of the attack. Using hashtags like #kofigay and #kofitrumutrumu [an offensive term for gay people], some users found old photos of the boy and applied AI effects to make it look like he was dancing to the audio.
At the height of the trend on TikTok, the trolling evolved into a “Kofi dance challenge”, which recorded more than 4,000 pieces of content from users mimicking how he was abused.
This proliferation of content appeared to encourage at least three similar attacks, according to Peegah. “Dozens of cases have been documented after his accident,” he says. “As we saw that in about three cases, the victims were told to sing and dance like in Kofi’s video.”
TikTok says it removed the Kofi hashtags after being alerted to them by the Guardian, and says it “does not allow hate speech, hateful behaviour or promotion of hateful ideologies”; or “the sharing (or threatening to share) details about a person’s private sexual life”.
Meta, Snapchat and Grindr did not respond to requests for comment.
* Some names have been changed to protect identities
