The Love of Your Life May Be a Teenage Scammer: nonfiction

“A new book examines the desperate lives of Nigeria’s romance scam artists — and their victims.

 

THE YAHOO BOYS: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers, by Carlos Barragán

 

In October 2008, Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, took the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Fingers pointed skyward, he danced along as the Nigerian Afrobeats artist Olu Maintain sang “Yahooze,” a song that celebrates the scam artists of Lagos.

 

Perhaps Powell did not understand that Yahoo boys, as they are known, make a living ripping off foreigners through the internet (the name refers to their yahoo.com email addresses); perhaps it was the fact that much of the song was in Yoruba. But Powell’s dance routine was possibly the most public inflection point in the history of Lagos’s scammers.

 

The city’s demimonde of international fraudsters has existed since at least the 1940s, when an U.S. diplomatic cable from Lagos warned that a 14-year-old boy who went by “Prince Bil Morrison” was soliciting funds from gullible foreigners in order to unlock vast wealth — but the crimes truly took off when some of the world’s poorest people, in Lagos’s slums, gained access to the internet, and through it vast communities of lonely Westerners looking for companionship.

 

The journalist Carlos Barragán skilfully navigates this history in his debut, “The Yahoo Boys,” which humanizes both the perpetrators and their victims.

 

Barragán, a reporter and researcher at The New York Times, profiles four romance scammers to show how Yahoo boys and their targets inhabit the same universe of digital-age isolation.

 

“We live in a world that commodifies human connection,” Barragán writes, “and anyone who has tried to spend less time doomscrolling knows scammers aren’t the only ones profiting from our loneliness.”

 

Barragán came to the world of Nigerian scammers when his own mother was seduced over Tinder by a man purporting to be a U.S. soldier. After staging an intervention, Barragán did what any curious reporter might: He traveled to Lagos in an effort to track down the man who had broken his mother’s heart.

 

What he found there, in the neighborhood of Ikotun, was not the network of master criminals that he had expected, but rather a ramshackle group of meth- and weed-addicted young men scraping Amazon gift cards and bitcoins from their victims using well-worn routines. “Most of these men weren’t master manipulators,” he writes. “They were just fulfilling unmet emotional needs, relying on repetition and recycled scripts.”

 

Like Karen Hao’s recent “Empire of AI,” which demonstrated how the whiz-bang new world of artificial intelligence relies on miserable labor practices in low- income countries, “The Yahoo Boys” puts the lie to our image of technology as a realm of inevitable progress. Barragán has stared into the void, and on the other side, staring back, was not superintelligence but a gaggle of meth-addled teenagers.

 

While the Yahoo boys don’t entirely escape opprobrium, they are not the only villains in Barragán’s book. The history of misrule and pillage first by the British and then by homegrown elites is invoked as a reason that so many in Nigeria find themselves desperately scrabbling for their daily bread.

 

Barragán doesn’t simply leave it there: He is also highly critical of “the cages of isolation that tech companies have built, and monetized, with astonishing success.” As the Greek philosopher Kostas Axelos once put it, “Technologists only change the world in various ways in generalized indifference.” Barragán’s Yahoo boys surf that indifferent infrastructure, exploiting platforms and payment systems that weren’t designed with victims in mind, and in the book’s most remarkable passages, Barragán delves into just how alone scammers and scammed both feel.

 

At one point, he tracks down a Yahoo victim in rural America whose life has been destroyed by a scam artist. She describes the “five-second window” — the simple need to be acknowledged by another human being, even just for five seconds — that hooked her.

 

“It’s the saddest crime in the world,” another victim tells Barragán.

 

Barragán’s characters are vivid; they inspire sympathy and plumb the depths of wickedness. In the closing pages, we meet Miracle, a Yahoo girl. (Barragán met vanishingly few female scammers because, as he puts it, “they were more discreet, more calculating and, in many ways, smarter about their illegal activities than their male counterparts.”) Barragán sketches her tragic life story, which involves human trafficking and rape — but before the reader can feel out-and-out sympathy, we learn that she is even more dastardly and effective than the other subjects. She has, Barragán explains, built a new scam based on adoption.

 

In the end, Miracle scams Barragán out of taxi fare, ghosting him for an interview — and the author is forced to acknowledge the uneasy tension of how a relatively wealthy journalist relates to a subject who hails from poverty. “We were just like another victim,” Barragán writes, “waiting for someone who would never come.”

 

THE YAHOO BOYS: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers | By Carlos Barragán | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 287 pp. | $29

 

Nicolas Niarchos is the co-editor and co-founder of Now Voyager, a new magazine of international affairs, and the author of “The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth.””[1]

 

1. The Love of Your Life May Be a Teenage Scammer: nonfiction. Niarchos, Nicolas.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 27, 2026.