In February, OCCRP tracked down a 31-year-old man to his mansion in Nigeria’s capital Abuja. He had allegedly posed as the Crown Prince of Dubai to con a Romanian businesswoman out of more than $2.5 million in a romance scam, according to his victim and two accomplices. 

This is a well-trodden profession in Nigeria, where large numbers of young men, often facing extreme poverty, have taken to swindling lonely victims in wealthier countries to fill their pockets.  

Yet most of the romance scams originating in Nigeria are not particularly complex or lucrative, says journalist Carlos Barragán.

His recently published book, “The Yahoo Boys,” explores what drives the country's teenage fraudsters — whose nickname comes from the Yahoo email addresses used for “Nigerian prince” scams in the early days of the internet — and the repercussions of their scams in Nigeria and abroad.

How did you come to write your book?

My own mom ten years ago was trying to find a partner online after I told her that she should try a dating app. And after she met this wonderful American soldier called Brian, my mother fell in love. But Brian was, I discovered after a month, not an American soldier based in Syria, but actually a Nigerian scammer who was trying to lure in my mom so he could get some money.

After a few years of seeing my mom struggling with loneliness, I traveled to Nigeria trying to find Brian. Of course, I couldn't find Brian, but I was still very fascinated by the Nigerian romance scam industry. So instead of writing a personal memoir about my mom's scammer, I decided to investigate further and answer some of the questions I had.

Nigeria is infamous for internet scams perpetrated by so-called Yahoo boys. Would you mind giving a quick summary of how this problem took root?

In the ‘70s, Nigeria was so rich, there was a statistic about it being the leading importer of champagne in the world. A general said something along the lines of, “Nigeria's problem is not the money but how to spend it.” But then we had the oil crisis and by the end of the ’70s, Nigeria's debt ballooned. Suddenly, you had millions of people out of work, and many of them emigrated to the U.S. [and] to the U.K.

Nigerian historians say that it was during the ’80s when the Nigerian scam industry started. [Scammers] started sending letters, then these well-known emails to Americans and to Europeans saying, “I'm a Nigerian prince, but I need your help to access this money.”

During that time they were not targeting loneliness as they do now. During the ’90s … they would send you these letters telling you that if only you collaborated with them, you could access this incredibly huge amount of money. I think it's also a mirror of our own societies: In the ‘90s, capitalism was riding high. But then after the turn of the millennium, we get to social media, we get to smartphones, and [the scammers] move to target loneliness. And that's how we get to this position. Of course, we shouldn't forget that the economic situation in Nigeria, especially after the pandemic years and inflation, becomes dramatic to a point where many young people in Lagos start doing these scams.

Within Nigeria, there’s a perception that Yahoo boys are bringing much-needed cash to a local economy hollowed out by corruption. A Lagos resident tells you that “scammers steal from foreigners and spend their money here, politicians steal from us and send the money abroad.” How much is really going into the Nigerian economy from these scams?

In the book, I just focus on four Yahoo boys who in the big scheme of things are not making much money, except for [the one named] Chibuike. It's really difficult to get a sense of how much money is coming in, but in places like [the Lagos neighborhood where they live] Ikotun — a place where most people, if not struggling … live day by day — it's staggering to see the effects of Yahoo money.

You see it in so many stores, clubs, hotels, [and] businesses that probably wouldn't exist. In the book, I mention some Nigerians talking about how the economy could crumble without the Yahoo money, [although] I think that is probably a bit exaggerated.

For me, the most interesting thing is not the actual numbers because they don't exist (there isn’t an economist who has studied that — probably there's no real data). But it is the perception — to actually find Nigerians who tell you, “After oil, the scams are the biggest contributor to the Nigerian economy.” The perception really mattered for me and told me that I was in front of a very huge story.

You contrast scams coming from Southeast Asia, which are big, industrial-like operations, with the low-level scams coming from Nigeria, which are mostly teenagers working alone or in little clusters together. There’s a common misperception that Nigerian scammers operate as large criminal groups. You write that the leader of an American scam victim support group once called you a terrible reporter and threatened to hang up the phone on you when you suggested that Nigerian scammers don’t work as a big criminal syndicate. Why do you think that myth persists so strongly?

I had been reporting for less than a year. So when he said that, I doubted my own reporting. I thought maybe they were lying to me. And that was after one or two trips to Nigeria.

Why was he so keen on not actually wanting to hear the truth? I still don't have the answer.

I think that we want to believe that something bigger is behind these scams, because if it is a very sophisticated criminal enterprise behind my mom's scam, for example, I would accept reality easier. But if it's a teenager who is 15 and whose English is not very good, and maybe that day he couldn't have lunch because he doesn't have a single dollar, then I think that acts as a kind of twisted mirror, and it gives me back the responsibility for what's happening in my own family, in my own city, in my own society.

When I was talking to the head of this romance scam support group, he didn't want to talk at all about the responsibilities we have as a society. 

You write that corrupt local Nigerian police are more interested in extorting Yahoo boys than stamping out the problem, and peer pressure and lack of job prospects have spurred anywhere from 50% to 80% of Nigerian students into scamming. Tackling the problem from within Nigeria will obviously require enormous social and economic reforms. But what about the infrastructure Yahoo boys rely on? For example, you describe in your book how vendors in China help them turn the gift cards they get from their victims into cash. Are there ways to prevent scams at scale? 

I think Big Tech [companies] can do much more than they've done so far. Some of these scammers used to populate dating apps. None of the scammers I talked to were using dating apps because there were so many controls — background checks that they couldn't use them. Those [controls] can be checking your ID and checking that the ID matches your face, or maybe your location.

Of course, that taps into a bigger question about privacy … I was always amazed by the fact that many of the scammers I talked to were not even using a VPN. That tells you that Big Tech can know what is happening. And I wonder why they don't do anything.

It's a difficult problem because what does that mean? That you're going to stop people in Nigeria from talking to people in the U.S.? … Tech companies could give more information [about scams] for the elderly in America and in Europe — that would help.

There are different ways [to go after scam infrastructure], and those require solving matters of laundering money. If you're a Nigerian scammer, you cannot tell your victim, “Oh, transfer the money to this Nigerian bank account.” First, they will know that you're in Nigeria. Second, they will see that your name is a different name than the one you're using. So the way they do it is they ask the victim to buy a gift card.

Throughout the book, I wondered why this gift card economy is still working. It's not very good for consumers. First, consumers sometimes forget about their gift cards, so that's money left unspent. Second, some of these gift cards don't even work. But when you look at the numbers, it's tremendously profitable for the companies. And that's why absolutely every single company has their own gift card. So it is a matter of protecting consumers, probably.

And then you have something that requires international regulation, which is cryptocurrencies … That would require a level of international coordination that probably nowadays seems so far-fetched that it's difficult to imagine.

But [in reporting] I thought it was quite telling of our times that while Biggy was there smoking his joint, scamming $50 from a victim, sometimes he would FaceTime with a Chinese man in a corporate office, probably in Hong Kong or in Shenzhen. And just the idea of those two having a conversation because someone had been scammed in Mississippi — and that person in Mississippi had gone to Walmart to buy a gift card — is just mind-blowing.

This interview was lightly edited and condensed for clarity.