The Yahoo Boys

When his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragán came face to face with the human toll of online romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he set off on a journey to Lagos to find his mother’s scammer, where he stumbled on a much bigger story.

There, in a crowded and impoverished neighborhood in the midst of Africa’s largest city, he encountered thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves “Yahoo Boys,” and each year they catfish millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones.

In this astonishing work of immersion journalism, Barragán takes us inside the lives of four of the Yahoo Boys of Lagos. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria’s economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he’s responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky he manipulated online for years.

Some Yahoo Boys attain the status of folk heroes, buying houses and cars with the money they make, while others become dependent on drugs and “cash out”—successfully scam a victim—only to lose it all. Through the Yahoo Boys’ twisting fortunes, Barragán discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the brutal economic realities that drive them, and the moral dilemmas they confront.

A work of radical empathy, this book reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how loneliness in the West and poverty in Nigeria are two sides of the same screen.