Hey, Yahoo Boys readers! (Yahoozies? YahooBoyScouts? We can workshop it …)
Welcome back to WIRED Book Club. It’s 1 million degrees out across large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere, which means it’s the perfect weather to hide under a fan or air conditioner and read.
Reading Recap
Returning to Chibuike, we enter a grim scene: He’s depressed about losing his girlfriend, doing tons of drugs, and still scamming poor Theresa by pretending to be professional wrestler Cody Rhodes. Two years in, the Irish mother is finally getting fed up by the fake WWE star. The most gutting part is how low-effort his charade is; Chibuike/Cody sends her a few run-on sentences calling her his “sweet angel” and she forgives months of inconsistency, hostility, and constant demands for money.
Or, to be more specific—constant demand for Amazon gift cards, the preferred currency of scammers. “Gift cards, much like cryptocurrencies, are central to the scam economy,” Barragan writes. The Yahoo Boys would sell the cards’ codes to Chinese intermediaries, who then sell them to Chinese gamers who then use them to evade the Great Firewall and make digital purchases. And their Western victims, who thought they were helping their long-distance loved ones buy food, were actually helping teens in Shenzhen buy Call of Duty battle passes.
In a similar vein, when we return to 15-year-old Azeez, he’s making money to help his mom (heartwarming!) by impersonating horny women and sexting with pervy adults in the United States (oh no!), including a 71-year-old named Chad. Because Azeez can’t resist attempting to shower his mom with money, she quickly figures out he’s gotten himself mixed up in Yahoo, and she and his grandmother beg him to stop.
Then, things escalate quickly, making a teary-eyed nana look quaint. Barragan turns back to Trisha, the first scamming target to get her own chapter. The last time we checked in with her, Richie had been convinced that she was dead. But Barragan couldn’t find a trace of this woman’s death or life anywhere on the internet, and started wondering if the scammer had not in fact been the victim of a hoax himself. Barragan develops a fixation on Trisha, seeing her as a “stand-in for all the victims I had never met.” He ends up flying to Kentucky to track her down, leading to the most dramatic moment in the book: Trisha is spooked by his unexpected appearance, and also carrying a gun. After her fear subsides and she stops threatening to shoot him, Trisha tells Barragan a hell of a story about how Richie had convinced her to participate in a complicated scheme where he’d transfer her funds from scam victims and have her buy Bitcoin and give it back to him. She claims he told her he was working for “Prince Hammad,” a member of the Saudi royal family. At first, she made some money as she unwittingly helped Richie launder cash. Then the banks started catching on and freezing her assets, and she lost her house and destroyed her credit. By the time she accepted that she’d been scammed, her life was in tatters, which was why she decided to fake her own death. Reading these three chapters in succession is harrowing, honestly; it’s basically a sustained argument about how many if not most of the people on this earth are desperately, howlingly lonely and yearning for connection. Just casual summer reading!
Prior Reading
My lovely colleague Lily Hay Newman covered the rise of gift cards as the preferred currency for scammers way back in 2019. While the Yahoo Boys tend to be disorganized individuals, this is something that more sophisticated crime syndicates do, too, as her report reveals.
Reading about Chibuike demanding Amazon gift cards made me think of a very different book about the ways we use technology to both connect and deceive: Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, which came out last year. There’s a memorable chapter tracing Vara’s Amazon purchases. (There’s also another chapter that is adapted from this essay she wrote for us in 2023.) But back to the Amazon chapter, because that made me think of Lacey Donohue’s classic blog post “Prime of My Life: The Story of My 20s, As Told by Amazon Purchases,” which was somehow published 11 years ago, back when I was in my 20s.
Let’s Chat
We’re three weeks into the book club, and I’m curious how the pace feels to everyone. I’ve gotten some comments lamenting the lack of a more interactive component—and we appreciate the feedback. We’re trying something new! What else do you think we should add or change for next time? Leave a comment below.
