Welcome back to WIRED Book Club!
Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning, or you just picked up The Yahoo Boys today, I’m glad that you’re here. I’ve been eager to discuss this section in particular, because it introduces my personal favorite Yahoo Boy, sweet Azeez.
This letter covers chapters four through six, introducing two new Yahoo Boys (Azeez and Richie) and returning to Biggy’s antics. I’ll also go over some great reader questions, and zoom out a bit to discuss what else is happening in the world of online scams. (Spoiler: Nothing good.)
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Reading Recap
In contrast to Biggy and Chibuike, who we meet as young adults, Barragán introduces us to Azeez when he’s a gentle 14-year-old. He’s still young enough to travel to Lagos in the care of his grandmother, to weep because he misses her once she goes home, to confide in her that he doesn’t have anybody to play with in his new neighborhood. Plus, he’s so poor, he’s forced to sit on her lap for a four-hour bus ride to Lagos, to save money on fare. Enough to drive even the most angelic adolescent to petty crime!
Azeez’s first section showcases how regular kids get roped into the Yahoo Boys lifestyle. It weaves in a lively potted history of Nigerian scamming, tracing it back to desperate measures to survive British colonial rule, where officers would trick local chiefs into giving up their land, teaching locals that scamming was the pathway to power. (I didn’t realize how far back fake-prince grifts go; Barragán describes a 1949 case where a schoolboy duped adult Americans into thinking he was “Prince Bil Morrison,” a temporarily-embarrassed royal in need of financial aid.) I wish the book had more cultural history included, because this section provides a glimpse of context but left me wanting to read more.
Because Barragán takes such care to describe Azeez’s youth and poverty, and how his dire finances were part of a larger economic tragedy—the scene at the end of the chapter where he rejoices over affording fried chicken didn’t tug on my heartstrings so much as it yanked them out of my body, double-knotted them, and then shoved them down my throat—you can’t help but feel protective over him, even as you know what he’s doing is going to destroy other people who are equally as human.
This feeling of sympathy was quickly tempered by the next chapter, though, which focuses on a much less-likable new scammer, Richie, as well as his target, Trisha. A “middle-aged white woman from Kentucky with thin eyebrows, spidery fake eyelashes, and neon-pink lipstick,” Trisha is a fascinating and necessary addition to the narrative, which thus far has spent almost all of its time with the perpetrators of crimes rather than the victims. According to Richie, Trisha died after he drained her bank account—maybe it was a suicide, maybe she was murdered, maybe she had cancer, he’s not sure—but Barragán hints that none of these options may be true. Intrigue!
And then we return to Biggy, and get more of his backstory, tracing his roots to his grandfather’s scrappy survival strategy during the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. Unlike Azeez, Biggy is relatively affluent, and the 30-year-old’s motivations for scamming are harder to forgive. Barragán doesn’t sugarcoat how callous and unremorseful Biggy is, and his reaction to Biggy sharing some of the intimate messages he swaps with one of his subjects is queasy. “Seeing these messages felt like reading someone’s diary without their permission,” Barragán writes. I, too, had an increasingly guilty sensation while reading that; in conveying the inner workings of these scams in such gory detail, reading some of these passages can feel like a violation. I couldn’t help wondering how Biggy’s victims might feel if they find out that their private confessions are now fodder for upmarket literary non-fiction.
Prior Reading
In Richie’s section, Barragán attempts to quantify exactly how many Nigerians are Yahoo Boys, and walks away gobsmacked by how commonplace scamming is among young people. As a tech reporter reading this book, I have so many follow-up questions about efforts to identify and count these fraudsters, and went looking for any news that pointed to the volume of scams. One interesting data point: in 2024, Meta banned over 63,000 Instagram accounts linked to Yahoo Boys who were attempting “sextortion” of their victims. Considering how long these guys spend building relationships before they attempt any kind of money grabs, let alone blackmail attempts—sometimes months!—this suggests the number of Yahoo Boys accounts in operation must be exponentially higher.
And if you’re interested in some newer tactics Yahoo Boys are embracing, check out this story my colleague Matt Burgess wrote last year on how some of these scammers create AI-generated news anchors as part of their blackmail schemes. I’ll have to ask Matt for an update on whether they’ve grown even more sophisticated since he published.
Let’s Chat
Our discussion got off to a lively start last week. One of the first comments led to a moment of complete panic on my end. A reader asked why I’d gotten the name of the wrestler Chibuike impersonated and the nationality of the woman he scammed wrong. A very reasonable question!! I was temporarily worried I’d had some sort of neurological event!!! But the actual answer is this: Before a book is published, an uncorrected manuscript version known as a “galley” gets sent out to reviewers and other media. I wrote the first newsletter after reading the galley and sent it off to my editors, not realizing that there would be several key details changed in the finished version. Please accept my apology for this goofy blunder—I should’ve cracked open the lovely finished hardcover that was sent over instead of clinging to the dog-eared copy I first read. I’m only looking at the finished version from here on out! And I hope you learned something about the publishing biz, at least.
Another reader asked whether there are any programs meant to help prospective Yahoo Boys have a more hopeful future. Great question. Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is planning programs to rehabilitate cybercriminals, but I haven’t found many specifics. It’s clear there’s much more to do.
One Last Question
These chapters provide some historical context for how scamming got so popular in Nigeria. Did zooming out to see the structural forces that drive this behavior change how you saw Biggy and company? Let me know in the comments below.
Thanks to all who chimed in, and can’t wait to hit the comments section for another conversation this week!
