When his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragán came face to face with the human toll of online romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he set off on a journey to Lagos to find his mother’s scammer, where he stumbled on a much bigger story. In the midst of Africa’s largest city, he encountered thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves “Yahoo Boys,” and each year they catfish millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones.
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.
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.
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.
