The Yahoo Boys: The true story of four Nigerian scammers
by Jacob Judah · Australian Financial ReviewJacob Judah
Aug 11, 2026 – 5.00am
They are love stories that always end in tears. Nigerian internet scammers, posing as young women or dashing celebrities, scam Westerners too lonely or too naive to see the warning signs.
For Carlos Barragán, the story is personal. After his mother was duped by a Nigerian fraudster posing as an American soldier promising to ship gold from Syria, the Spanish journalist set out to discover the men behind the scamming accounts. How, he wondered, had they convinced an otherwise well-educated, middle-class woman in Madrid to bare her soul to a stranger online?
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