The Yahoo Boys

When his mother fell for an ‘American soldier’ who promised to send gold bars to their Madrid apartment, Carlos Barragan found himself with an unexpected window into the shadowy world of online romance fraud. He set off on a journey to find his mother’s scammer, but what he discovered was much bigger: a world of young Nigerian men who drag themselves out of destitution by catfishing lonely hearts in the US and Europe, in the process building a dizzying local economy from their phones.

The Yahoo Boys follows four scammers in Ikotun – one of Lagos’s poorest neighbourhoods, a scant ten miles from the gleaming heart of the megacity. Through their twisting fortunes, Barragan discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the economic desperation that drives them, and the moral dilemmas they face.

A work of radical empathy, this astonishing narrative nonfiction debut reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how isolation in the West and poverty in Nigeria are just two sides of the same screen.