Every man his own Escobar: A review of Carlos Barragan’s ‘The Yahoo Boys’

Carlos Barragan's "The Yahoo Boys" delves into the world of Lagos's online scammers, offering a close look at their lives and methods. The book follows several individuals, detailing their challenging upbringings and educational struggles, which seemingly led them into the lucrative, yet illicit, world of cybercrime.

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When the Spanish journalist Carlos Barragan announced recently on LinkedIn that The Yahoo Boys, his book about the online scammers of Lagos, had just been released, the comment section beneath his post was animated.

Barragan gained intimate access, allowing him to include lengthy dialogues between scammers and their victims. These exchanges reveal a spectrum of emotions, from transactional coldness to sentimentality and even moments of dark humor. The scammers finance their extravagant lifestyles, marked by new tattoos and jewelry, through gift cards and cryptocurrency obtained from unsuspecting individuals, referred to as "magas" or marks, primarily in Europe, America, and Australia.

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His subtitle, Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers telegraphs his narrow focus, since to encompass all the niches of the Nigerian scam world would have required a baggy monster of a book.

The book also highlights the interconnectedness of global cybercrime, illustrating how technology facilitates both the scams and their exposure. It shows how a gift card defrauded from an American grandfather can be sold by a Nigerian scammer to an online vendor in China. One subject, Chibuike, who poses as WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes online, defrauds a woman named Theresa of thousands of euros, funding a life of luxury in hotel suites.

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Barragan was granted a confessional, forensic degree of access to the social media chat histories of some of his interviewees, and he incldes lengthy passages of dialogue between the scammers and their victims, dialogue that is by turns transactional, sentimental, comic, and moving.

However, the same technology that enables these scams also provides avenues for detection. The narrative touches upon the complexities of reporting on such subjects, with some Nigerian commenters on Barragan's LinkedIn post questioning his motives and fearing another "jaundiced Western portrait of Nigeria." The reviewer acknowledges that no one can police a journalist's chosen subject matter, while noting the book's focus on romance scammers in Lagos's Ikotun neighborhood.

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It is a vignette on globalisation, and the intertwining of cybercrime, technology, and ecommerce, and Barragan tells it deftly.