Inside the Secret World of Nigerian Romance Scammers

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Nearly $1 billion, that’s the sum extracted out of the U.S. last year from online catfish scams preying on lonely Americans. Using fake dating site profiles and promising relationships, young men based in Nigeria are persuading individuals to send them thousands of dollars. Journalist and author Carlos Barragan’s new book looks at the effectiveness of these scams, which hit close to home after his mother became a victim. He joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what this issue reveals about cultural failures in both the United States and Nigeria.

 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Carlos Barragán, thanks so much for joining us. Your recent book is called, “The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers.” What provoked you to go into this story? What was the trigger?

 

CARLOS BARRAGÁN: Thank you so much for having me here, Hari. Long time ago, around 10 years ago, my mom met a wonderful American man on a dating app. And, you know, she’s a single mom. She was taking care of me and my two brothers. And she was so excited after meeting this man called Brian that we thought, Okay, why not? But then the relationship became — was very weird from the beginning. They were exchanging emails. The guy said he was based in Syria as an American soldier. And after a month, the guy said that he was going to ship some gold bars to our apartment. Of course, my mom didn’t care about the gold bars, but it was the idea of starting a new life together. And I knew that it was a scam. So I traced the IP email address. And the guy, Brian, was not in Syria, but actually he was in Lagos, Nigeria. So after a few years of me watching my mom struggling with loneliness, I was very curious. You know, I wanted to know who was the guy behind these scams. So I went to Nigeria. 

 

SREENIVASAN: As any good reporter would, right? And you quit your job. You traveled to this place. I mean, what was your first impression? I mean, were you looking for something? Were you looking for kind of a big organized crime ring and, you know, huge machines that were powering all of this, and then what did you actually find?

 

BARRAGÁN: So it’s important to note that exactly, Nigeria, has this bad rep about scammers, but there are scammers everywhere. Might change the kind of scams they do, but, you know, right now we have a lot of scams in Southeast Asia, and these people are well-organized mafias who enslave people to act as scammers. So I was expecting some sort of something like that, you know, very well-organized syndicate in Nigeria. Very dangerous. Very reckless. But what I found actually was a bunch of kids, maybe teenagers who were just acting as freelancers with their phone, scamming lonely westerners. And they were learning how to do that by talking to their older brothers, older friends, passing scripts where they could get information on how to talk to lonely people. So there was no syndicate, it was just a bunch of kids with phones.

 

SREENIVASAN: Wow. So what would, what was the environment like? Where were they doing this? What was their kind of day-to-day life like?

 

BARRAGÁN: So I focus the book on Ikotun, which is a poor neighborhood in Lagos. Lagos is a massive city. And in Ikotun, most of the boys I talk to, you know, this is a community where most of the people there, or some of the people there, struggled to eat sometimes, especially since the pandemic, when inflation hit hard. And these boys spend most of the nights, “working” as they would call it, because they are talking to Americans online. And because of the time zone, they have to spend their nights awake talking to men and women on the other side of the ocean. So they spend their night — their mornings sleeping, and then they, sometimes they smoke drugs to keep awake. And obviously they also spend the money they scam —they get from these victims.

 

SREENIVASAN: And when you say they spent the money they scam, how much money are we talking about? I mean, you can talk about individual cases and then kind of abstract to how big of a problem this is.

 

BARRAGÁN: So, for example, one of the characters I follow, his name is Azeez. He’s a 14-year-old boy who came from the village, and his mom sells food on the street. She makes $2 a day. Of course, she, this little boy doesn’t really know about the automatization of the so-called — the so-called automatization of the Western world. But he learns from other people how to talk to, for example, a truck driver in California. And he struggles a lot getting money from these victims because he doesn’t know how to talk to them. But the first $5 he gets, he goes to a restaurant with air conditioning for the first time in his life, and he buys jollof rice and chicken, which is 10 times more expensive than what his mom had given him that morning. 

 

Now, that is, that is one case that shows how poor some of these young boys are. But other cases when they get more money, because there are victims who might send hundreds, if not thousands of dollars: they go to clubs, they go to hotels, and they splurge the money to tell the community, “I made it.” So, in a way, it’s also very connected to status. 

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, so tell me about how society deals with this, right? It must not be a secret on how this 14-year-old or 18-year-old are making so much money that they can buy huge bottle service in a club. What do the parents think? What does society think? Because there’s also an economic ripple effect of those dollars. 

 

BARRAGÁN: Yeah, it creates a lot of tension. You just have to mention the word “yahoo” to a Nigerian, and I feel like 50% of the people are completely against it. And the other 50 have their reservations because, you know, they might mention “colonialism” or they might mention “slavery,” some of the causes that in a way created the current Nigeria as it is. And at the same time, this money, as you said, has ripple effects, because these scammers who are 18, 20, 25, they get the money. And around them, there is a whole community trying to get their share of the pie as well. And you have boutique stores, hotel owners, even police officers, all sorts of people trying to get that money from that boy who just wants to share it, or at least wants to brag about his illicit gains. 

 

And I think that it creates this sort of tension where the community in the short term is receiving money that in a way might end up in, like, being paid in school fees or food for young people. But in the long term, it is detrimental for the community because these young people end up without learning any trade.

 

SREENIVASAN: What are the customers overseas from the United States, England, whatever, what do they need? Why are they willing to engage in these false relationships in the first place?

 

BARRAGÁN: So whenever I talk to the Yahoo Boys, Biggy, for example, he’s a 30-year-old man in Ikotun, he would mention all the time, the same word: attention. You have to give the clients — because they call their victims clients — you have to give them attention. And by, after a lot of hours talking to these scammers, you know, I talk to more than 50 of them, you realize that these are not very sophisticated scammers or masterminds, actually, they’re just there all the time. They know that sometimes saying, How was your day? What do you have for breakfast? What are you gonna do today – is more powerful than sending these very beautiful message. And it made me think, you know, I think that is the key point of the book, how lonely some people are in the Western world, that this 14-year-old boy, who has never left Lagos in his life, is able to get some money from this victim. And I’m not trying to put the blame on the individual, on the victim, but society around the victim.

 

SREENIVASAN: You’re kind of pointing out that there’s this massive demand infrastructure of people that are lonely. And I wonder if some of those people know that this is too good to be true, but they still like the connection with another person? I mean, your mom was receptive to the idea that this is a scammer, here’s the proof. But sometimes when you point that out to people, they seem to actively ignore it.

 

BARRAGÁN: I have scammers telling me, I was scamming a victim, and the police went to her or his house, and the police told them, You’re being scammed. And the victim told the scammer, The police came, but I believe you. All these scammers told me they know their victims know they’re being scammed, but they still talk to them. Of course, reality is always very complex and messy. For example, in the case of my mom, she shared with us, with my brothers and me, some of the things about the scam, because I think she was divided. And definitely in a world that commodifies human connection and attention, I do think that some of these victims know what’s going on. And in fact, I also talked to victims and one of them told me, I’m still talking to my boy, even though she knew that this was a Nigerian scammer. He put me under his spell. He — she mentioned the word spell. And I think certainly there’s a bit of that.

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, it’s interesting that a child at the age of 14 is able to tap into what in America we consider a loneliness epidemic. I mean, there’s numbers here that an estimated 52 million adults are, you know, experience loneliness at least once a week. What’s happening to us? How are we so compartmentalized? How are we not able to see each other on the street and say Hello, and how was your day? And, you know, check in on each other as human beings in the society that we’re in. And here we are using the internet to find this connection somewhere else.

 

BARRAGÁN: I have one Nigerian man who told me, You Americans — even though I’m a Spaniard, but he meant you Westerners — have all the money in the world, but have no shoulder to cry on. While here in Nigeria, we have everyone around us, but we have no money. And I think it is the central paradox of the book that it is quite sad that these people who are providing something to each other have to lie to the other person to give that. And I think that we are not really aware of how lonely some of the people around us are, because some of the victims who were being scammed, actually, they were in relationships. When we talk about loneliness, it’s not only about isolation. I think that it probably is connected to the golden cage the tech companies have built to make an enormous profit and also to keep us engaged.

 

SREENIVASAN: Tell me a little bit about some of the costs, some of the dangers, how much people are spending on this, and what happens to their lives.

 

BARRAGÁN: Well, it’s very difficult to put numbers to this because, for example, the authorities say that these crime scams are reported only by 5% of the victims, because there is a lot of shame involved. So the consequences of telling your family or the world that, I’ve been scammed. They always, the victims always told me they are tired of hearing, what a fool you are. And another victim said, This is the saddest crime in the world, not only because of the money you lose, actually, probably that is the, that is not the biggest concern. But because you’ve built an understanding of you thought that the love of your life was a real person. And it is very hard for someone who’s not experienced that to empathize with that person. But I always— readers or listeners, just for a second, imagine that the person you’ve been loving for the last 2, 3, 10 years is not the person who he or she said they are. And that put you in a very difficult position psychologically and mentally. 

 

SREENIVASAN: On the supply side, we seem to have this loneliness epidemic, right, that might lead people. And then on the kind of demand side, over on the Nigerian front, you have incredible inequality and poverty, and it feels like you would do anything to put food on your table. And when you see what your mother might do for a living, and how little money you get and how little bread, so to speak, you get, this alternative seems like, Ah, this is almost a victimless crime. I’m not actually, you know, murdering anybody. I’m not, I’m not engaging in gang violence, and I just have to spend some time on my phone and stay up all night.

 

BARRAGÁN: I think this is a problem of globalization and extreme inequality. When in the past, you were living in a city that was, that had a lot of inequality. In the long run, either it was going to lead to socio-instability or to authoritarianism to control that instability. What happened with the internet is that suddenly these people in Nigeria — but it could also happen in other parts of the world — they had a window into our riches, and that socio instability, maybe they are not born in riches because they can’t get to America, but they are talking to lonely people and they are scamming them. 

 

And certainly there’s also the aftershocks of colonialism and slavery and the British Empire created in a country out of nowhere. So in the book, for example, you have this character who is Biggy’s grandfather who had to dress up as a woman during the Civil War that in a way was also impacted by the British misrule in West Africa. So it was quite a paradox Biggy’s grandfather had to dress up as a woman to survive as an Igbo in the Civil War. And 60 years later, his grandson is also dressing up as a woman online to survive.

 

SREENIVASAN: For a lot of people in my age, you know, the Nigerian Prince emails, that’s the stuff that came around the 1990s. But in your book, you go back into the history of scamming Nigeria and you go way further. What, what is that?

 

BARRAGÁN: Well, for me, it was very important to trace back the origin of impersonation scams in West Africa. Of course highlighting the point that there is nothing particularly Nigerian about these scams. But of course, the socioeconomic and the historical conditions that led to this scam are important. And, you know, you have west Africans so terrified by the British men in the early 20th century, when they got there and they fooled some of the locals with fake arrangements to get their land, that some of the locals got dressed up as the white man with their clothes pretending to be someone who’s been sent by the British Empire. And they would steal cattle, they would steal grain, they would steal all sorts of things to other communities, not to their own community, but to others’ communities. Wow. So in a way, it is quite paradoxical that the first time they did this kind of ruse, it was a result of colonialism.  

 

You know, we shouldn’t forget that colonialism has also this kind of weird aftershocks. And in a way, this is also the result of what we did 100 years ago, 200 years ago. And I’m not saying that this is just one dimensional like cause. But the same way that we look at, for example American shooters, and we try to understand all the socioeconomic conditions that drive them to do such a horrific act. I think we should deserve the same level of empathy to other people.

 

SREENIVASAN: In 2025, there were more than 23,000 complaints of different kinds of confidence and romance crimes that were filed in the U.S. And the estimate is that these crimes cost, you know, people lost almost a billion dollars. Why do you think these crimes have become so prevalent and so widespread?

 

BARRAGÁN: It’s a difficult question, but I do think that the main reason is that, you know, going back to the Yahoo Boys answers, because for me it was very important to understand their perspective. You know, I couldn’t understand why my mom had fallen for this scam. So maybe these young boys who are getting the money can explain to me why suddenly thousands, if not of tens of thousands of westerners are sending the money to people who’ve never met in their real lives. And I think it goes back to the idea of attention. You know, I would throw them the word loneliness, that they would throw me back the word of attention. And we are — we, all of us, we are spending so much time on our devices, on our phones, and these tech companies are competing for our attention the same way that Yahoo Boys are competing for the victims’ attention. 

 

So I do think that when I look at my mom, when I look at the people I love, sometimes I feel I don’t have enough time for them. And I wonder where is that time going? So especially after the pandemic, a lot of people, I think they do feel completely disconnected from society. And they are just by talking to these people and they are trying to feel a void, that we’ve decided that we were not going to feel as partners brothers and sisters or children.

 

SREENIVASAN: Carlos Barragán, the author of the book called “The Yahoo Boys.” Thanks so much for your time.

 

BARRAGÁN: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.