By the time Chibuike was 24 years old, he had been kicked out of his family home multiple times, developed a drug addiction, attempted suicide, and scammed tens of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting victims overseas. For most of his career as a cybercriminal, Chibuike lived in one hotel after another in his native Ikotun—a bustling, impoverished neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria. He spent lavishly on nights out, knockoff designer wares, and an ever-expanding circle of friends. At night, buoyed by meth and crack, he logged hours on his phone, talking to women who thought they were talking to the American wrestler Cody Rhodes.
Chibuike is a “Yahoo Boy,” a moniker for online fraudsters based in West Africa, especially Nigeria, who con foreigners out of their life savings. Named for the Yahoo email addresses they once used, they build intimate, often romantic relationships with their victims based on fake personas. With enough time and ingenuity, they extract money from “clients” in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world where digital manipulation, sextortion, or fake cryptocurrency investment opportunities can lure lucrative targets.
Chibuike is one of four young men at the center of Carlos Barragán’s riveting new book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers. Barragán, a reporter at The New York Times, was drawn into the subject when his own mother fell prey to a Nigerian scammer masquerading as a U.S. soldier. What began as a quest for her scammer became a more searching look into the real lives of Yahoo Boys, and how their crimes and aspirations offered a grim reflection of a modern world riddled with poverty, inequality, and transoceanic loneliness.
The “Nigerian prince” email is one of the best known online frauds: A deposed royal asks his unwitting recipients for help with a frozen bank account, promising a generous cut of his estate in exchange for a small advance payment. The fortune is, of course, nonexistent. The beguiling prince makes off with his ill-gotten gains, and the victim is left brooding over their depleted bank account and their naiveté.
Though “Nigerian prince” emails exploded in step with the expansion of the internet in the 2000s, versions of the scheme were prevalent long before the digital age, operating via the postal service and fax machines. 419 scams—named after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code—have their roots in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, which created ideal conditions for legally questionable get-rich-quick schemes. As the historian Stephen Ellis has observed, the British practice of colonial governance through indigenous elites, known as indirect rule, incentivized charlatanry and corruption among local officials with unchecked power. One commissioner in southeastern Nigeria deceived locals into thinking he possessed supernatural powers, while another officer used a glass eye to create the impression that he was always watching his subordinates. At times, ordinary people masqueraded as colonial officials to demand fines from their victims. “Some Nigerians realized they could exploit the terrifying power and reputation of the white man and his symbols of authority to extort their fellow Nigerians,” the historian Max Siollun has explained. Later impersonation scammers cast a wider net, such as when “Prince Bil Morrison,” who was really a 14-year-old schoolboy, began soliciting funds from American and Canadian “pen pals” in the 1940s.
Following the end of empire, economic opportunities abounded in Africa as the continent’s new political elites sought foreign capital to fund the costly work of nation-building. This created a class of well-connected intermediaries who profited off the position they straddled between foreign firms and domestic resources. One such middleman was Nigeria’s first Finance Minister Festus Okotie-Eboh, who, according to one American diplomat, “attracted much foreign investment to his country and was spurred to do so because he operated on a straight commission basis.”
The 1970s oil boom led to an influx of petrodollars even as it deepened economic inequality and corruption, leaving millions of educated youths in poverty. Eager to mimic the wealth flaunted by corrupt elites amid scarcity, many young people turned to fraud. The director of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Commission estimated in 2023 that seven out of 10 students were involved in cybercrimes, Barragán relates. A new generation of scammers would incorporate into their playbooks tales of payouts and windfalls that often drew inspiration from real headlines. Their fabricated offers to share funds embezzled from government accounts would gain credibility precisely because cases of embezzlement took place so regularly—such as when the former head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation was arrested for fraud and money laundering in 2017.
This is the world Chibuike, Biggy, Richie, and Azeez grew up in. They are blessed with unbridled entrepreneurial spirit yet cursed with limited avenues along which to channel it. Throughout the book, Barragán makes clear the narrow horizon of choices on offer. The other jobs they hold at various points—Richie has worked as a cashier at a sports betting center and Azeez apprenticed at a neighborhood tailor—pay poorly and afford no real upward mobility. When Barragán asked Biggy where he saw himself in five years, he responded: “A rich-ass motherfucker.” In reality, Biggy was about to turn 30, still living at home, and perpetually on the verge of being broke. It was this disjuncture between their outsize economic ambitions and disappointing realities that fostered the allure of Yahooing. As Biggy explained, “I started doing it for a better life, because the country itself is fucked up.” A smartphone, which can be purchased for as little as five thousand naira (less than four dollars), becomes a golden ticket, promising at once deliverance and ruin.
The stories that Yahoo Boys tell themselves are varied. Some, like Biggy, see the wealth they scam out of foreigners as a form of reparations for slavery and colonialism. Others view successful scams as acts of empowerment. In a world in which negative stereotypes about African incompetence remain pervasive, they wear the ability to outcon unsuspecting white people as a badge of honor. At times, the reason for scamming is movingly simple: Azeez, the youngest scammer Barragán interviewed, turned to Yahooing just so he could dine at the local restaurant Foodcity again.
Many Yahoo Boys see themselves as Robin Hood characters, giving away significant portions of their earnings to schoolchildren, friends, and acquaintances. They’re also generous in sharing “formats,” pre-written documents with step-by-step instructions on how to approach romance scam victims. Neighborhood stores thrive on their earnings and spending habits. “We are brainers, not scammers,” one of them told Barragán proudly. “We’re bringing money to the country.” Miracle, a Yahoo Girl, has paintings of both Pablo Escobar and the Virgin Mary hanging in her room. Barragán observes that “when she needed money, she prayed to both.”
Richie, Azeez, and others may have embraced Yahooing for material reasons, but what keeps them in thrall to the hustle are the intangibles: dignity, status, purpose, community, a sense of self. Barragán shows how all four men had experienced the kind of invisibility that came with poverty. Chibuike, for instance, admitted to feeling “completely alone in the world for as long as he could remember, and spending money on people was his way of filling that void.” In Ikotun, a successful “cashout” could transform an anonymous teenager into a local celebrity, with new clothes, new friends, and a new place in the pecking order. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, one character reflects on his newly acquired status as a Big Man in Lagos: “People treat you differently … Suddenly you’re getting all of this sucking-up from people because they think you expect it, all this exaggerated politeness, exaggerated praise, even exaggerated respect that you haven’t earned at all, and it’s so fake and so garish, it’s like a bad overcolored painting, but sometimes you start believing a little bit of it yourself and sometimes you see yourself differently.”
The attempt to understand what, exactly, makes Yahoo Boys tick is the driving force of Barragán’s account. Unassuming and open-minded, Barragán has a knack for getting them to open up to him. Perhaps this is because Nigerian poverty and Western loneliness occupy two sides of the same coin. Both stem from the ravages of late-stage capitalism. The American or European retiree who spent decades working long hours while social bonds frayed, and the Nigerian teen whose wages fail to keep pace with inflation are both paying the price of upholding the global economic system, even as they remain on its margins.
Barragán’s story is set firmly in the late 2010s and early 2020s: the Covid-19 pandemic casts a long shadow, exacerbating economic volatility in the Global South and social isolation everywhere else. Lockdowns across the globe made surviving on honest wages in Lagos even harder, as many industries slowed, while “clients” in the West who were social distancing became all the more hungry for connection. The pathologies of our current moment—the yearning for genuine human connection, the ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and, in Chibuike’s case, a parasocial celebrity culture in the social media era—play out in living color.
Especially memorable is Barragán’s description of the inner workings of the scam economy, which illustrates both the wonders and pitfalls of internet-driven globalization: The American or European victim purchases a U.S. gift card for their Nigerian scammer, who sells it to Chinese contacts, who then unload it on netizens eager to circumvent the “Great Firewall.” The scam economy thus functions as an illicit subsector of the global economy with its own supply chains and digital networks. “We live in a world that commodifies human connection,” Barragán writes. The application of market logic to relationships recasts them as economic opportunities, leaving little room for alternative ethical frameworks.
Interestingly, Barragán draws the worlds of the Yahoo Boys more vividly than those of their victims, whose appearances in the book are episodic and anticlimactic. Towards the end of the book, Barragán explains his decision to shift the narrative focus from victims to perpetrators: “I wanted to understand how these boys saw us, how they made sense of our isolation, and how that shaped their lives and community.” This turned out to be the right call. Scam victims are usually less clear-eyed than their scammers about what happened. “Imagine if you’ve been single for ten years,” Biggy, for instance, reflects at one point. “Then, all of a sudden, someone starts showing you attention? Would you want to let go of it so soon? You won’t.”
The Yahoo Boys is, in form, a tragic coming of age story. As Chibuike, Biggy, Richie, and Azeez move from adolescence to early adulthood, they undergo the same patterns of experimentation and reinvention as their more fortunate counterparts in wealthier countries. Unlike teenagers from more privileged backgrounds, who often have the means to recover from mistakes, the young men of Ikotun rarely get second chances. When Azeez appeared on the cusp of a more promising life, I couldn’t help but root for him, which makes his uncertain end all the more devastating. By the end of Barragán’s story, he has renounced Yahooing in hopes of going back to school. Yet his family’s inability to come up with the registration fees leaves him in a no man’s land between his past and his future.
At once bold and empathetic, The Yahoo Boys is a rare account of the subterranean world of our digital age and those who inhabit it. The book bears an epigraph from James Baldwin: “What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you.” It’s an artful reminder that poverty and inequality in one place is poverty and inequality everywhere. Africa’s economic challenges—in part a legacy of colonialism—reverberate back to the West, a dark mirror of the insecure affluence and gamified isolation that define the lives of so many.
