Hello, fellow readers!
Somehow, we’re halfway through the summer and all the way to the final chapters of The Yahoo Boys. It’s like the saying goes: Time flies when you’re examining the psyches of technology-enabled grifters.
Also, make sure to mark your calendars: We have a WIRED Book Club livestream coming up on July 16 at noon ET / 9 am PT. You can find more details here.
Reading Recap
First up, we check back in with the first Yahoo Boy, Biggy, who has recently turned 30. (More of a Yahoo Man now, really.) Two years have passed since he and Barragán first started speaking, and the writer has watched him deteriorate, developing breathing problems and struggling to successfully scam like he once had. He’s impersonating a hot blonde named Jessica on Facebook and trying to rob a 73-year-old Vietnam vet who describes himself as “lonesome,” but the man has finally caught on to Biggy’s tricks.
Biggy’s got one thing going for him, though: He’s nabbed a Yahoo Girl named Miracle for a girlfriend. Unfortunately, in Barragán’s telling, she’s the most sociopathic person in this entire book, a conniving creature with “small, sharp eyes that always seemed a little annoyed with you” and “a harshness to her expression that I couldn’t quite place.” Miracle is not without a sympathetic backstory: She describes a harrowing set of experiences that include getting sex-trafficked in Mali. But she’s unnervingly proud of taking her scamming to the next level of cruelty by posing as an adoption agency and bilking aspiring parents. She shows Barragán desperate pleas from a woman from whom she stole tens of thousands of dollars by pretending she would allow her to adopt “baby Annie,” a child who did not exist. “With lucid self-awareness, she destroyed peoples’ lives,” Barragán writes. Reading his descriptions of Miracle felt like running into the limits of Barragán’s empathy, finally; he seems so defeated realizing anew how rotten this grift is.
Chibuike’s chapter compounds all this grimness. He’s homeless, hungry, and so desperate he keeps reaching out to Theresa, the Irish mother he’d tricked into believing he was the wrestler Cody Rhodes. She no longer believes him and usually writes back exasperated messages, and Barragán questions why Chibuike keeps bothering a target who clearly won’t give him any more money. “She’s the only one that still cares about me,” Chibuike confesses.
Azeez’s ending isn’t much more uplifting. He’s out of the Yahoo lifestyle, but he’s struggling; he wants to go to school, but his mother doesn’t have enough money to send him. He tries an apprenticeship to a tailor, but this, too, peters out because of a lack of funds. He has renounced the path that we’ve seen Biggy and Chibuike take to dark places, but he’s not really going anywhere. Barragán closes the book on a melancholy image: Azeez is stuck looking at the Lagos traffic with nothing to do and nowhere to go, watching “as the world seemed to move on without him.”
Prior Reading
These chapters touch on the rise of AI as a scamming tool, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t link out to some of my colleagues’ recent excellent work on the subject. Earlier this year, our intrepid AI Lab leader Will Knight wrote about his surreal experience testing AI models programmed to scam. And last week, EJ Dickson published a bonkers investigation into a gay hookup app that appeared to be using deepfaked AI influencers as hype men.
One of my main takeaways from The Yahoo Boys experience is, apparently, that stories about charming but malevolent scammers are ideal summertime reads. Even though I have a legitimately concerning number of books in my home, I just ordered American Trickster, by Ru Marshall, the new biography of the countercultural guru Carlos Castaneda, who turned out to be a big fat fraud. Will let you all know how it is!
Let’s Chat
Well, we made it to the end of The Yahoo Boys, and I hope you had as much fun as I did spelunking into this murky world.
Speaking of the book’s end, I enjoyed how Barragán pulled back the curtain on his reporting process in the author’s note in its final pages, detailing how the narrative is the result of over 120 hours of interviews with the scammers. Not only is that impressive from a reporting standpoint, he also probably helped their victims hang onto thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars by keeping the boys off their phones for so much time.
I have to admit, I’m sad to close the book. But this is an opportunity to start thinking about WIRED Book Club’s next chapter. I’ll be scouting for our next read and discussing ways to make this even more fun and interactive in the future—and in the meantime, keep an eye out in your inbox for some more updates later this summer about what we’re reading and loving.
