EYDER PERALTA, HOST:
A lonely man, Brandon (ph), finds a profile on social media - maybe it's Facebook or Instagram. It's a pretty woman. She's polished, filtered. Natasha (ph) says she's looking for new friends. That's the bait. The man reaches out. They begin to exchange messages. That's the hook. Their texts go like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF TEXT ALERT CHIME)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Natasha) Why were you afraid?
(SOUNDBITE OF TYPING ON CELLPHONE)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #2: (As Brandon) I just want you to be good all the time.
(SOUNDBITE OF TEXT SENT ALERT)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Natasha) That's not possible.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYPING ON CELLPHONE)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #2: (As Brandon) Yeah. It's probably not really possible for anybody, but you still kind of hope for it, especially for somebody you like.
(SOUNDBITE OF TEXT SENT ALERT)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Natasha) Babe, look, you can't always be happy.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYPING ON CELLPHONE)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #2: (As Brandon) I don't know if I'll ever be truly happy again. I think the only chance I have is if I had a special woman with me.
PERLATA: With enough persistence and promises from Natasha, Brandon will send her $25, 50, 100, even more, until he eventually catches on. That exchange comes from Carlos Barragan's new book, "The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, And The Real Lives Of Nigeria's Romance Scammers." And he joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the program.
CARLOS BARRAGAN: Thank you so much for having me here.
PERLATA: Is that a typical exchange between one of these romance scammers and their victim?
BARRAGAN: I've seen that a thousand times, sometimes even more sophisticated.
PERLATA: Tell us, I mean, how did you come to report on this world of scammers?
BARRAGAN: So long story short, my own mom, who was a single mother - she was texting on Tinder, and she met an American soldier who was posted in Syria. After, I would say, a month of texting with this man, my mom was fairly in love with him, and she was convinced he was moving to Madrid to live with her. At some point, I became so suspicious that I traced this guy's email address, and I found out he was texting my mom from Lagos. For my mom, it was very - I would say, fairly devastating. A few years later in - during the pandemic, the lockdowns in Spain were so hard and my mom was so lonely that I kept thinking about my mom's scammer. But I couldn't find him. So I decided to move to Lagos and try to meet these scammers.
PERLATA: These guys are known as Yahoo boys. Where does that name come from?
BARRAGAN: Back in the '90s, they were already doing what Americans and Europeans might know as the Nigerian prince scam - telling a westerner that you might have some money as a Nigerian prince, and you needed a white person to help you get that money. But in the 2000s, I would say they moved from targeting greed to targeting loneliness. And in Nigeria, the first email accounts that were widely available were the Yahoo accounts.
PERLATA: So tell us about them. I mean, who are they typically, and, you know, what is the average day? I mean, really, they work through the night. What is it like for a Yahoo boy?
BARRAGAN: So as I tell my book, where I tell the story of four Yahoo boys in a small community in Lagos, most of these people are in their late teens, early 20s. They are unemployed men who have no opportunities, and they are trying to get by. Because they are scamming Americans who live in a different time zone, they can't do much in the early hours of the day. To keep awake, they do drugs to stay concentrated and keep talking to their victims.
PERLATA: So let's talk about one of the young men you profile, Chibuike. How did he become a Yahoo boy?
BARRAGAN: The case with Chibuike - he was raised in a world that didn't care that much about him. And once he saw that other teenagers were making money - he didn't have a way to get by - he just followed them. So what he did was something that was on the rise around 2018 called celebrity scams. And he impersonated a WWE superstars, Cody Rhodes, because he used to watch WWE fights with his stepfather. And he met an Irish woman, and he managed to scam tens of thousands of euros from that woman.
PERLATA: How did she not catch on that he was not the real wrestler, Cody Rhodes? I mean, why would he ask her for money?
BARRAGAN: This is a very important question and a question that I've asked myself throughout the whole investigation. And even started even with my own mom - why did she think that she was talking to an American soldier in Syria? And I know that all these scams sound preposterous to most people. But I think, when talking about these victims, one has to make the effort to put themselves in their shoes. And we are talking about people who have gone through hell.
In the case of Theresa (ph), for example, I know from reading the conversations with Chibuike, her husband had died, and she was quite isolated. She was a single mother. And one thing I've seen with other cases is that they are so isolated that they kind of, like, lose sense of reality. Another thing that is important to note is that sometimes these people don't have friends who can tell them, what are you doing? Don't you see that this is not true? Or sometimes, like the case of my mom, they do have friends and family, but it's just too late. The scammer has already trapped the victim.
PERLATA: Carlos, I mean, do some of these Yahoo boys - I mean, do they get emotionally involved? Do they fall in love with their victims?
BARRAGAN: They tell me that they do. In some way, I do think that there is some sort of psychological attachment to their victims. Because once you see that there are so many young scammers doing this - we are not talking about psychopaths. Certainly, they are doing some things that are morally reprobable (ph). But the way to do these crimes is either by doing a lot of drugs, so you kind of, like, shut down your conscience, or by finding a way to justify what you're doing. Some people tell themselves that, actually, they are doing a favor to the victim. They are kind of like therapists, so they should be paid for that time.
PERLATA: You say in the book that you don't know how big this problem is, but it's big, right? There's a lot of young men involved in this. Are there societal concerns? I mean, what does it mean for Nigeria's future?
BARRAGAN: There is definitely a lot of concern about this. As in any struggling society that has problems with crime, when you have all these teenagers who are dreaming of riches, and they don't want to follow the legit path, then you have a society that is not working for the young people. And I had tailors who would tell me, I cannot find young men who want to work with me because Yahoo is such a big allure. They want quick money, and that obviously has an impact on society.
PERLATA: In your author's note, you say that you came into this thinking about a book on loneliness. What did you learn about loneliness in writing this?
BARRAGAN: Once you see the reality of who these scammers are, that they are not masterminds of the universe playing with your minds, you realize the extent of the crisis in our own world. One thing I keep telling people, you know, you might not be scammed right now. But the problem is, when you are going through a deep crisis in life, you will need people around you to support you, and without them, you might be able to fall for scams.
But yes, I've realized the importance of connection in our own lives. Also, maybe you should leave your phone behind for a while and try to stay together with the people around you because otherwise you might lose some money.
PERLATA: That's Carlos Barragan. His new book is called "The Yahoo Boys." Thanks so much for talking with us.
BARRAGAN: Thank you so much for inviting me.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERAMED'S "FORTALEZA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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