Barragán brings a surprising depth and empathy to The Yahoo Boys, to the tin roofs and traffic jams of Lagos, the SIM cards and Apple IDs that buttress this edifice of deceit. He’s gone rappelling into the bottomless pit that surrounds desire. The result is a compassionate, elegant, unsettling book about some extremely shabby people. At least they’re still people, though.
The journalist Carlos Barragán skillfully navigates this history in his debut, The Yahoo Boys, which humanizes both the perpetrators and their victims ... Puts the lie to our image of technology as a realm of inevitable progress ... Barragán’s characters are vivid; they inspire sympathy and plumb the depths of wickedness.
More than crime reportage ... Mr. Barragán’s achievement is to make this world intelligible without making excuses for it. He has a reporter’s gift for proximity. He lets the scammers talk—at length, often hilariously—but not hide inside their own mythology. ... Mr. Barragán shows us young men who are morally hollow without pretending that they are not also human. That only makes the damage harder to look away from ... If the book has a weakness, it is that these tech platforms that make the scams scalable remain more backdrop than subject. Mr. Barragán offers no easy answers.
A fascinating and illuminating exploration of the people on both sides of internet scams: the victims in rich countries and perpetrators in poor countries ... The Yahoo Boys is based on more than 120 hours of recorded conversations with some 250 interviewees. It concludes that Nigerian scammers are not, for the most part, members of mafias or complex criminal gangs, though we might like to think of them that way.
Unassuming and open-minded ... Especially memorable is Barragán’s description of the inner workings of the scam economy, which illustrates both the wonders and pitfalls of internet-driven globalization ... Interestingly, Barragán draws the worlds of the Yahoo Boys more vividly than those of their victims, whose appearances in the book are episodic and anticlimactic ... At once bold and empathetic, The Yahoo Boys is a rare account of the subterranean world of our digital age and those who inhabit it ... An artful reminder that poverty and inequality in one place is poverty and inequality everywhere.
For his debut book, Barragán immersed himself in the heart of a scam ring in Lagos, Nigeria, spending time among the local 'Yahoo Boys' ... Barragán delves into the psychology and economics that drive people to commit these scams and opens the curtain on loneliness and what many will do for human connection. Readers will be drawn to Barragán’s storytelling style and the on-the-streets insights he gained investigating this underworld.
Barragán’s immersive narrative is riveting, evoking empathy for victims as well as perpetrators ... The Yahoo Boys is a comprehensive account of a little-understood, pervasive and psychologically complex crime, as well as a testament to Barragán’s journalistic chops and sensitivity.
Barragán’s first book deftly weaves together the complicated legacy of the West African enslavement trade and British colonial rule, the corruption and rampant inflation of modern-day Lagos, and the individual life stories of several Yahoo Boys to present a holistic overview of the methods, motives, and means by which romance scammers flourish in Nigeria.
This outstanding debut from New York Times reporter Barragán explores the lives of Nigerian scammers who use seduction as part of their grift ... The book is most noteworthy for its affecting humanization of both the Yahoo Boys—Barragán shatters the image of romance scammers as part of 'well-organized Mafia-like syndicates,' instead revealing them as impoverished young men scrambling to survive—and of their victims, made vulnerable by the West’s loneliness epidemic. It’s a remarkably empathetic view of both sides of the con.
