The Yahoo Boys
Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos
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3 Months Free
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The Yahoo Boys
Narrated by:
Nathan Luwa
Buy Now for £17.94
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Narrated by:
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Nathan Luwa
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By:
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Carlos Barragán
'AFFECTING' TELEGRAPH
'ENGROSSING' ECONOMIST
'COMPELLING' WIRED
'MORE THAN CRIME REPORTAGE' WALL STREET JOURNAL
When his mother fell for an 'American soldier' who promised to send gold bars to their Madrid apartment, Carlos Barragán 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, Barragán 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.
'BARRAGÁN WRITES WITH IMPECCABLE EMPATHY . . . COMPELLINGLY READABLE' BARBARA DEMICK
'ASTONISHING . . . I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN. A TOUR DE FORCE' JON LEE ANDERSON
'BOTH INTIMATELY PERSONAL AND GLOBALLY RELEVANT' DIPO FALOYIN
'AN ENVIABLE FEAT OF REPORTAGE AND WRITING - AS INTREPID AS IT IS SYMPATHETIC' GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS©2026 Carlos Barragán (P)2026 Macmillan Audio
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Critic reviews
[Barragán] discovered a whole new world, one in which the internet promises a route out of chronic poverty, and where answers to the West's ongoing loneliness epidemic are - however temporarily - being offered by people almost as desperate . . . Affecting . . . It would be easy to dismiss the Yahoo boys as nothing more than heartless manipulators, yet I found some of my sympathies - to my surprise - lying with them
Engrossing . . . Takes readers from Kentucky to Lagos . . . Barragán wonders how credulous Westerners can fall head-over-heels for such smarmy scripts. But he finds something alarmingly simple: the scammers are successful because they provide attention to lonely people
More than crime reportage . . . 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. When the Yahoo Boys try to justify their behavior by invoking reparations for slavery or revenge for white colonialism, the author keeps pressing until the rhetoric gives way to something smaller and uglier: appetite, vanity, boredom and the pleasure of getting away with it
Carlos Barragán traveled to Lagos, Nigeria in search of the con artist who had romanced his divorced mother. He found himself submerged in the sleepless, hard-partying world of the Yahoo Boys - a subculture fueled by music, booze and drugs, as well as poverty and ambition and even love. Barragán writes with impeccable empathy about both the scammers and their lonelyheart victims . . . A compellingly readable exploration of the psychology of the romance scam (BARBARA DEMICK, author of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove and Nothing To Envy)
Fascinating and important. Carlos Barragán has constructed something full of warmth and empathy, both intimately personal and globally relevant (DIPO FALOYIN, author of Africa Is Not A Country)
Reads like a compelling novel
I have found few books lately as immediately compelling as Barragán's . . . As an unexpected, fresh take on the bewilderingly quicksilver world we live in, The Yahoo Boys is a tour-de-force (JON LEE ANDERSON, author of To Lose a War and Che Guevara)
If Carlos Barragán's The Yahoo Boys were merely a picaresque tour of the world of Nigerian scammers, it would have been worth it for the entertainment value alone. In his hands, however, this is a technically sophisticated, emotionally acute, and sociologically wise exploration of a shadow economy driven by devices, loneliness, and global inequality. It's an enviable feat of reportage and writing - as intrepid as it is sympathetic (GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS, author of A Sense of Direction)
Through four sensitively crafted portraits of young Nigerian scammers, Barragán shows us young men caught between hard luck and hard choices . . . A wonderful accomplishment (MARK DE ROND, star of Predators)
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