Carlos Barragán paid little attention to his mother, Silvia, when she told her that he had started chatting with a US military pilot named Brian. The alarms went off for him and his brothers five weeks later, when Silvia, a dentist by profession, received an email from her new North American friend -who first said he was stationed in China and then on a special mission in Syria - in which he told her that he was going to send him several gold bars that he had found in the hideout of a terrorist group.
The children saw that it looked like a scam, they managed to find the IP (the numerical address that identifies communications on the Internet) of the supposed military man and they discovered that he was not in China, nor in Syria, but in Nigeria. A quick search returned thousands of references: Nigeria has been, since the beginning of the Internet, the paradise of the Yahoo Boys, the young men who dedicate themselves to defrauding Westerners, both men and women, creating false profiles on social networks and earning their confidence based on many hours of chat.
Barragán, who is a budding journalist and writer and is studying a master's degree in narrative journalism at Columbia University with a scholarship from La Caixa, started from that story that happened to his mother in 2016 to carry out an in-depth investigation into the Yahoo Boys phenomenon in Nigeria. Just a few days ago, he published a very long report in the literary magazine The Atavist, in which he mixes the first person, talking, among other things, about the complicated divorce of his parents and how his mother has managed the empty nest syndrome, with the analysis in situ of the Nigerian Yahoo Boys phenomenon.
The text was an instant success. Joyce Carol Oates, who in addition to one of the most celebrated American authors of the last half century is a hyperactive tweeter, highlighted it. Several publishers and agents contacted him to offer him contracts. The 27-year-old journalist has been caught working by the riot. He has returned to Nigeria to continue collecting data and interviews for a future book in which he wants to expand on this story. His idea is to write and publish it in English, since it is a global phenomenon that is supported by the use of universal English – it is the official language of Nigeria – and because the majority of victims of this type of scam are Americans.
According to the FTC, the body that protects consumers in that country, in 2021 alone, 13,000 million dollars were delivered in the form of "love scams", 80% more than in 2020 and six times more than in 2017. Barragán is convinced that in reality the real figure must be much higher, since most of those who are scammed do not report it and in many cases do not even mention it in their environment, out of sheer shame, especially in the case of men.
“I had the preconceived idea that the victims were mostly women, because if you search the internet, most of the stories you find are about them, but the real ratio is surely 50/50,” the journalist explains. “The difference is that if they want to scam a woman you have to dedicate yourself to the long term. That's what the Yahoo Boys in Nigeria tell you, that once they're in love they're a gold mine. On the other hand, with men everything is much faster. You pose as a scantily clad sexy woman and after a while you promise to come see him in exchange for money, perhaps to hire a babysitter. In two or three days you can get 100 dollars. I have read conversations of lonely men ”, he says.
It is not surprising that they want to hide, one only has to look at the informative treatment that was given this week to the news that the Granada Ideal uncovered about the woman who was scammed up to $170,000 by a fake Brad Pitt posing as the actor, who He promised that he would marry her. "She has gone for the clicks," Barragán believes. “Nobody asks what happens to a person to believe it. I find it very interesting to know what happens to these people.” In the case of her mother, as revealed in the story published by The Atavist, nothing happened to her and everything happened to her. “By many metrics, my mother, Silvia, is a successful woman. She opened her first dental clinic in Spain before she was 30 and she treated more than 10,000 patients in the following two decades. She married and had three children, of which I am the youngest. But her from my father's divorce from her in 2003, when she was 44, was turbulent and costly. After the separation, my brothers and I lived with our mother in several rented apartments in Madrid. For a long time, my mother's only resource was a Citroën C1. Most of her salary went to food, education and an annual vacation with us,” she writes.
Biggy, one of the professional scammers he contacted in Nigeria and who ended up acting as his guide and companion throughout the journey, explains that the most important thing is privacy. Flatter the victims, tell them jokes, ask them about their lives and build a private language. In the case of Brian and Silvia, Barragán's mother, they had a song, the ballad All of me by John Legend, which he dedicated to her. “The most important thing,” Biggy says, “is to keep the conversation going. Dating someone requires patience. It takes time for a client to trust you.” Because that's how scammers refer to their victims, customers.
It is estimated that in the country, which has a youth unemployment rate of over 50% (it survives thanks to activities in B), there are hundreds of thousands of young people working as Yahoo Boys. Its name comes from the server that became popular in Nigeria (and around the world) in the early 2000s, when the famous emails from the "Nigerian prince" began to circulate, demanding an advance money in exchange for collecting an inheritance. mysterious.
Some of these Yahoo Boys combine this activity, which they carry out mainly at night, due to the time difference, with other legitimate jobs such as taxi drivers, cooks or waiters. The most successful live on their own in the best neighborhoods of Lagos, order champagne in clubs and buy high-end cars. Most of them earn much less and some of them live in shared flats with other Yahoo Boys. It doesn't seem like there are women doing this job. At most, accomplices, friends who show their faces when a victim insists on keeping in touch by Facetime or Zoom.
Biggy, for example, tells Barragán in the report that he earns enough to pay his expenses and the rent on his parents' house. Opinion in the country is divided between those who see the Yahoo Boys as folk heroes, who steal from gullible foreigners (revenge for centuries of colonialism and exploitation) and leave their nairas (Nigerian currency) at home, and those who they think they are a national disgrace. Rappers dedicate songs to them, in the same way that the rumba quinqui of the eighties glorified figures like El Vaquilla in Spain.
In his research, Barragán has classified different types of Yahoo Boys. Brian, the man who tried to scam his mother, and with whom for the moment he has not been able to find, would fall within the very common military scams. They pose as members of the Army because that has a certain attraction for many women, because it justifies them being abroad and very busy with their work and because it can potentially put them in vulnerable situations that require remittances. Others pretend to be celebrities, oil well workers or, classic, claim to be doctors in Yemen. “The good ones – the journalist points out – investigate a lot and say they live in the United States, right in the neighboring state of their victim. They have very worked Facebook profiles to be able to pass themselves off as white Americans”.
To be able to do that, they rely on very good English and a very deep knowledge of American popular culture, something that almost everyone on the globe is fluent in. “At first I asked them more in case they developed ambiguous feelings for their clients, but not so much anymore. He would say that it feels bad for them to do it but they hide it. Only a minority of the Yahoo Boys feel they are doing well. This is studied in Psychology. They generate feelings of self-defense so they don't think about the damage they are creating. They prefer to see their victims as helpers (helpers) or godparents”. On the other hand, when they see that they can earn $500 in a night's work, they have a hard time quitting.
In the future book, Barragán will abound in the stories of the Yahoo Boys and also those of their victims, some of whom do not want to assume that this person to whom they had opened up and confided all their intimacies does not really exist. “Sometimes they get to write to their scammer things like: ‘the police have come to my house and told me that you are not real, I do not believe them. The key, Biggy acknowledges to Barragán in the article, is loneliness. You have to identify a person who feels lonely and the mission of the Yahoo Boy is to make him believe that he (or she, if he is impersonating a woman) is too. The victims are called "maga" which means foolish, or gullible.
In his own home, the pilot Brian has become part of the family folklore and when they refer to him they almost always do so jokingly. But for many people he has interviewed, discovering that they have been deceived in this way has left a trace of bitterness that is difficult to repair. It was summed up by a woman from California, who came to combine several Yahoo Boys and now misses them: "It is the saddest crime."
