THE YAHOO BOYS

In which Miss Lonelyhearts makes her (no, his) home in Lagos.

It’s a fixture of the evening news: Someone falls for a charming stranger from somewhere far away, perhaps serving in the military in Iraq or a widow in Manila, and is bilked out of his or her retirement account. Spanish journalist Barragán’s own mother fell for one such fraudster, who was supposedly going to “ship her some bars of solid gold he found in a terrorist stash.” Barragán learns that the losses to romance scams amounted, in 2022 alone, to $1.3 billion. But hitting the road and heading to Nigeria, an epicenter, he finds that most of the scams are committed by young men who, usually posing as women, target victims with long-distance blandishments. They have good reason for this, a critical but empathetic Barragán writes: Corruption is endemic, and jobs few in Nigeria. He writes of a principal informant: “Biggy seemed like any depressed young man facing the possibility that his life would amount to nothing.” The culture of these “Yahoo Boys” surely seems a slow death of despair, built on drink and endless drugs, consumed, Barragán hazards, “to avoid thinking too much about what they were doing.” It’s not crime alone that’s epidemic in Barragán’s account—the loneliness of modern life, reckoned by the U.N. to constitute a world health crisis, feeds into the hands of the scammers. After living in their world, which is not without some self-awareness, he writes of the Yahoo Boys (and occasional young woman), “I was beginning to understand that scammers grasped our loneliness better than most people. Certainly better than I did.” There’s much description but little prescription here—no solution to any of the broad-ranging social problems that feed into the romance-scam syndrome. All the same, it’s an interesting inquiry.

A provocative view of the grift from inside the grifters’ unenviable world.