When his mother fell for an online romance scam, Carlos Barragán flew to Nigeria to track down the con artist. What he uncovered was so much bigger.

Guest

Carlos Barragán, reporter for The New York Times. Author of “The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers.”

Book Excerpt

Excerpted from THE YAHOO BOYS: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Carlos  Barragán. All rights reserved.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I 

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Everyone needs to feel loved, right? It’s as fundamental a need as needing to eat. That’s why we hunger for someone to hold us, even if that person is thousands of miles away. That need is so deep that finding someone who cares, who is devoted to us, can save lives.

But it can also ruin lives when that person turns out not to care about you at all, isn’t even real, and is part of an organized network built to exploit the vulnerable and lonely. Carlos Barragan can tell you about how much that hurts, because it happened to his mother, and that’s the story he shares in his new book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers.

And Carlos joins us today from Madrid. Carlos, welcome to On Point.

CARLOS BARRAGAN: Thank you so much for having me here, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m so glad. I’m wondering if, in telling the story of your mother, if you can actually start kind of e- even in your childhood. Tell us a little bit about her, what it was like growing up with her.

BARRAGAN: So we are a middle family of three. I have two brothers, older brothers, and middle, I would say middle, upper middle class. But my parents got divorced very early. I was five. So we were living with my mom. She was mostly taking care of us, putting food on the table making sure we did our homework.

So she didn’t have much time to date other people. And when she did, she always found it very frustrating. So that led probably to the situation where she was eager to find, to finally find someone, and it was me who told her, “You know, why don’t you join this dating app back in 2015? Perhaps you can finally meet someone.” And she did.

CHAKRABARTI: Before we get to that, there’s so much about her before before this really tragic story that I’d like to actually celebrate, right? Because you said that she raised you and your two brothers, so three boys on her own. She  owned her own business.

She had her own dental clinic. And her name was Sylvia, by the way, or is Sylvia. And even though there were times of some financial hardship, right?

BARRAGAN: Well, I wouldn’t say hardship, but at the same time, she wouldn’t, for a long time, she didn’t own anything except for a tiny car she used to take us to school.

Because basically she was giving us everything we needed or wanted. For example, I tell in the book that she always told us “For books and travel, there’s always going to be money in my house.” So I think she was prioritizing us over her.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder if at that time when you were growing up that you ever I mean, she clearly devoted her lives to you and your brothers, and which great mothers do.

But at that time, did you get a sense that she there was a hole in her life elsewhere, that she needed someone who was not one of her sons to be in her life to love her? I mean, I know that’s like, that’s a lot to ask, especially of a young child to notice, but I understand.

BARRAGAN: No no, I understand. First I would say that nobody is a superhero. So, even though my mom was taking care of us, there were moments where she would try to meet other people or she was not at home. And, we are three boys, and so our initial reaction was of resentment. Like, “Where is our mom? Why is she not here?” So I, especially as the youngest child, I always struggled to see my mom beyond the figure of a mother. And I think that is, from my conversations with friends, it’s something that usually young men have a problem with, like trying to see their mother as a more full human being than just a mother. She certainly had those holes, and she was trying to fill them in.

CHAKRABARTI: I don’t think it’s necessarily exclusive to young boys, by the way, Carlos. Our mothers loom large in a unique way in all of our lives. Okay. So appreciate you telling us a little bit about her before the story in your book picks up.

So you had been saying that what, around 2014, 2015 you suggested to her like, “Hey, if you’re looking for someone to be in your life, try this, this online site,” right?

BARRAGAN: Exactly. And also it’s important to note that my mom, my mom right now is 66, 67. I think there’s a particular problem of her generation and like dating with men of that generation. I think was one of the first few generations of women who were also working as much as men or even more, and they were starting to making more money, and they were taking care of their families. So I think there was a, a gender clash between my mother’s generation with the men of that generation.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So you point her to Tinder, right? And who did she meet on Tinder?

BARRAGAN: It was very fast. I would say that after a couple of months, my mom one day she came home and told me and my brothers that she had met this beautiful man. And my mom is a person who can get excited very quickly.

And for us, it felt, it rang like a story we had heard many times. My mom gets excited, and then reality is not as good as she thought it was. And but she recovers very quickly. She picks up very fast. So we didn’t pay much attention about this American soldier who was posted in Syria. I think it was my oldest brother who is in the military here in Spain who said, “That sounds very weird. That sounds like a scam.” But rather than believing my brother, what she did, my mom was she cut him off and she only shared updates with mostly with me. And after a few weeks, my mom was talking to Brian almost every day on email. There were like a few phone calls, but Brian always gave some excuses.

And, it happened very fast. After a month my mom was already imagining Brian coming to Madrid, and they were going to live together. And she even bought two rings one for her, one for him. So there was a lot going on in those emails.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. So just to be clear this “Brian” claimed that he was an American soldier based in Syria, and what did he say about his own sort of personal life?

BARRAGAN: He said that he had had a wife, but now he was single, and he had kids in the United States, but he was a lonely man in Syria and wanted to start over again. And he came across as this very empathetic emotional man who just wanted a way out of the military.

CHAKRABARTI: Right. And, you’ve actually read some of the emails that your mother exchanged with Brian, and he comes across as not only someone who’s looking for a way out of the military, but who seems to genuinely want to care for your mother, too, right?

BARRAGAN: Yes. At the beginning, my mom felt a bit uncomfortable with the level of care Brian was showing her, because my mom, and probably none of us, have experienced that amount of care right after meeting someone. Like, there’s a process of falling in love with someone.

But Brian was giving these beautiful words to my mom, and even though my mom was a bit wary at the beginning, I think that at some point she kind of, like, surrendered in, accepting those words, because in a way, it was very flattery, flattering for my, my mom. And she needed that care as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I mean, him saying very quickly, like, “We’re going to have a beautiful life together. I’m going to take care of you,” things like that. A quick question. So Brian said he’s an American soldier in Syria. Your mother is Spanish. Were they communicating in English or Spanish, or what language were the emails going back and forth in?

BARRAGAN: It was in English. And my mom learned a bit of English in school. Her English was not great, but sometimes she would use Google Translator or something like that. And Meghna, I have to say that Brian’s emails, they also had a few mistakes. But back then I thought, maybe he’s just typing fast. At the same time, I knew from the beginning there was something off, but he was not asking her for anything. So, even if I had that suspicion, I could not tell my mom, “Stop doing this,” because Brian was not asking for anything.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. And especially when you found out what she was telling him, right? You have one of the emails from your mom in the book. I’m just going to read a little section of it. She writes to Brian, “All of my life since I was a child, then as a wife, and then as a working mother, I’ve taken care of others, and now I want someone to take care of me.” When you first saw that, Carlos, what did you think?

BARRAGAN: I would say that probably that’s one of the things that propelled me to write this book, because there’s so much in that sentence, and so much of my mom that I don’t know about. And you ask, you always have the feeling that a lot about your friends and your family, and especially my mom, we are very close. And I remember that time I had this knowing feeling of I have to take care of my mom. She’s so lonely, I have to be with her. And suddenly reading this this sentence that was the actual opposite of what I was imagining of me and my brothers taking care of her because she was lonely, and it acted as a mirror of my own life. And it made me see that human beings, of course, it’s so obvious, but we are much more than the roles we impose on others, right? Like, my mom is not only my mom, she’s a woman who needs care and attention.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I was just going to offer that no matter how much, and you obviously, you cared for your, care for your mother profoundly, no matter how much you would be able to do, it’s not the same as her having a partner instead of children or in addition to children.

So you said you got suspicious, you and your brothers got suspicious. And then you check on where some of these emails are coming from. And where were they coming from?

BARRAGAN: So, yes it happened because Brian told my mom that at some point he was going to send some actual gold bars, solid gold bars to my apartment, and with that, they were going to start a new life together.

And when that happened, I got suspicious, and I thought that it was a scam. And effectively, these emails were not coming from Syria, they were coming from Nigeria, and I told my mom, and she just said, “Oh my God, what a fool I am.”

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Carlos, I have to say, I have read about it in the book. I have discussed this with Paige Sutherland, who produced this hour for us, several times. But every time I think about that moment where you tell your mother, “These emails are not coming from Syria, they’re coming from Nigeria,” and her response is that what a fool she has been, it just, it breaks my heart.

If I were in Madrid right now, Carlos, I would want to hug your mother because she can’t blame herself. I mean, we are all so vulnerable when it comes to this very profound need. We’ll get to the rest of the story in just a second, but I’m just wondering, I hope she doesn’t still blame herself for falling into this trap that so many people do.

BARRAGAN: I think that the fact that she was willing, not only willing but eager for me to tell this story means that she’s not blaming herself anymore. She understands that this is a societal issue, and she would tell you that she wants me to tell the story because without her children, she would have fallen for it.

And that is not putting all the blame on her, but reminding listeners that we are living in a world where technology is evolving so fast that people, especially older people, cannot just catch up. But yeah, those words they, they struck me very hard. And I would say that at that moment, I thought my mom is quite strong, because she said that and she moved on very quickly. But over the years, those words had a different meaning every time I wondered who my mom was and why she had fallen for the scam.

CHAKRABARTI: I personally think it’s very hard for people of any age to live in a world where we have to be so relentlessly skeptical of people who reach out to us.

It’s very, very challenging, and it’s not really the way I wish we had to live. But that’s why we need reporters, Carlos, to be skeptical for us. And therefore, your experience as a New York Times reporter really kicks in here. So let’s fast-forward to March of 2022, when you just decided, well, you’re gonna find this person who’s in Nigeria, who was claiming to love your mother and wanted to hold her and change her life. So you actually flew to Lagos, and what happened next?

BARRAGAN: So there were these two elements. One was me not understanding my mom, and there was like a void that I wanted to fill. I wanted to understand why someone I deeply admired had fallen for this. And then, two, was the pandemic. I felt that a lot of people were falling for this.

I read about it in the news. And I also saw my own mom struggling with loneliness. So I just wanted to meet Brian, not out of vengeance or anything like that, just of curiosity, because I wanted to understand. I wanted to see if they knew something about us that we didn’t, them being the scammers.

Obviously, I didn’t meet Brian because when I got to Lagos, I saw that there were so many young men trapped in their own kind of like cage doing these scams, that they were just imitating their older brothers and friends because there was, for so many of them, the only way to scrap, to get by. And what I saw was something that impacted me a lot because I was expecting this sophisticated ring of scammers kind of like what you would have seen in a movie. And most of the scammers I met were 19-year-old boys or 20-something-year-old boys who were just, sending thousands of messages to people on Facebook okay.

CHAKRABARTI: So these are the Yahoo boys then?

BARRAGAN: Yes, and they are called like that because the Yahoo email service was the first one that got to Nigeria in the early 2000s, and the word just became a very charged word in Nigeria. It’s all related to fraud, and they are just, especially in Lagos where I spent, I’ve been there so many times, and I’ve spent months there living in Lagos.

It’s very easy to see them, especially in the poor neighborhoods of Lagos, where you just have to go to a shabby hotel and you will see them strutting through the doors like if they were football stars, because they wear these crisp clothes they just bought from the boutiques with the money they got from the lonely Westerners.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So, so let’s just pause here for a second because even though you said your mother hadn’t actually given, quote, unquote, “Brian” any money, many people do when they fall into these scams. But I’m about to ask a question which I hope does not sound ridiculous Carlos, because when I first read the book, I thought, “Is this sort of an evolution of what we all a decade or two ago encountered with the now sort of joke of the Nigerian prince email who needs money scam?”

BARRAGAN: It is totally. It is an evolution. In the ’80s and especially in the ’90s, uh, a lot of unemployed Nigerians, uh, who were the descendants of the boom and bust of the golden Nigerian years in the ’70s when they found oil, they were sending these letters to Americans and Europeans claiming to be Nigerian princes or Nigerian petroleum ministers, and if they were doing that, it was because there was a tiny percentage in America and in Europe who believed them.

And these, these letters basically said, “If you send me 5% of the amount I have is here this will be yours.” So these scammers were targeting greed. But I think it’s very telling of the time we’re living in right now, that in the 2000s and mostly 2010s when the smartphone comes in and then social media comes in, they are not targeting greed anymore. They are targeting loneliness. And then suddenly they have access to a cheap smartphone, and there’s a character in the book whose whose name is Aziz. He’s 14. He’s playing with a very cheap smartphone, and then an older friend tells him, “What are you doing? You’re wasting your time. You should do Yahoo.” And he impersonates a white woman online, and he starts messaging, American men on Facebook.

CHAKRABARTI: This 14-year-old Nigerian boy impersonates a white woman online and convinces American men that she’s real, that this fake white woman is real. He must be, I don’t know what that says about stereotypes of white women, but that’s quite something, Carlos.

BARRAGAN: Well, I think it’s quite bleak on both ends, but it’s also quite beautiful in the way that it tells you a lot about both worlds. One, it tells you that this young boy, given the right opportunities, could be somewhere else or wouldn’t get so much far than he’s getting because he’s from a slum in Lagos, and his mom, who sells food on the street they live in a cramped bedroom, the three of them, with his younger sister, and he cannot eat meat anymore because inflation happened during the pandemic. So this is a boy who is struggling to eat. And then obviously, I was very keen on following him because you see how he’s learning about the Western loneliness epidemic, and also because it’s easier to empathize with a boy like him than with a 30-year-old man who is still harming others. And I think it was very important to see how this begins. And also it was hilarious to see that this boy didn’t know anything at all about the needs of a truck driver or a doctor in California, but he learns about the loneliness that they are suffering. So in a way, you learn with him about the ills of our own society.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. And, in fact, how little it takes when someone who’s genuinely lonely to feel connected all of a sudden. I mean, that’s, I think that’s… You keep saying that, and I think that’s such an important point in the book. There’s another, I mean, like you said, you were in Lagos for what, six months, and so you got to spend a lot of time, hundreds of hours, with these Yahoo boys.

So there’s another one that I’d love you to tell us a little bit about, Biggie. Can you tell us about him?

BARRAGAN: So, Biggie was this 30-year-old man in Lagos. He’s hilarious, but at the same time, he’s lazy, and I’m sure that he would be happy to be described with these two words. And he’s never had a real job in his life because from very early on, he has started doing Yahoo.

He lives with his mom, who sells food in the market, and with his father, who used to work in the Navy, but now he’s retired. So he smokes a lot of weed and, more powerful drugs, and this is something very common in Yahoo boys because he impersonates again, a white woman, but he’s also impersonated a white man, so he knows it all.

But if you’re talking to Americans, as most of them are doing, they need to be online at night, so Biggie takes a lot of drugs to stay awake. And he’s another of the main characters, and he’s obviously way more eloquent than Aziz because he’s seen it all, and he’s quite charming. And but at the same time, I opened the book with him for one reason.

He’s 30 years old. He’s scamming an American doctor who is making $40,000 a month, while his mom maybe makes $100 a month. And you can see from the very early pages that this is a man who is depressed, who actually kind of hates his job, and he wants a way out. But he’s in a situation where he cannot go back because he’s not learned a trade, and any job that he can, he can get will pay way less than his criminal activities.

CHAKRABARTI: And so, I mean, and he also talks about, as you said, the broader picture of how Nigeria’s economic straits, history of political corruption, things like that are actually playing out in the lives of these Yahoo boys.

BARRAGAN: Yes. I was very keen on understanding the reasons behind the scams. One thing that you quickly understand is that the circumstances behind the phenomenon. Another, another thing is condone it, and I was always very keen on doing the first. And there are so many reasons, historical, technological, socioeconomic conditions.

But then you ask them why they are doing it and do they feel guilty, and most of them, they don’t. For example, Biggie, he didn’t feel guilty. He was not proud of it, but he didn’t feel guilty. And, for some of them, I wouldn’t say a minority of them, but they would talk about colonization or slavery or what the Western world did to Nigeria, what the British Empire did to Nigeria, what the United States did to all the people who they enslaved.

But Biggie was actually talking about all the time he was spending online with these people. He was describing his criminal activities as if he was a therapist, and he should be paid for all the time he was putting in. Because he would say that so many of his victims actually knew what was happening, but they refused to accept reality, and instead, they send money for his attention.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, so he’s trying to convince himself then, it sounds like.

BARRAGAN: Exactly. And then that’s very common in criminal underworlds. Like, these people are now sociopaths. Some of them are, but Biggie was not a sociopath. And this is something that a lot of young men are doing in Lagos.

And, it doesn’t matter, you can look at any country in the world, when you see that something fishy is going on, whether it is legal, technically legal or illegal, so many people justify what they are doing, and they find ways to accept, to come to terms with it. Because otherwise you couldn’t live with it. And the way Biggie wakes up every morning, he’s just like rationalizes what he’s doing.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You said that that oftentimes, in fact, in the book you write that most often the people that they’re scamming are men, not just in the United States, but in other Western nations. It was interesting that men were the most often, the most frequent targets, but, women also. And in terms of when they start asking for money, it’s like gift cards and things like that. And and you wrote in the book that women and start paying the scammers and they basically pay them for a longer period of time.

BARRAGAN: Yeah, there’s one scammer who tells me why men pay faster, why women pay longer. It was quite shocking to me when I saw that most of the scammers I talked to were scamming men, because you have this stereotypical idea of the victim as a 50-year-old something who is a woman. But then I realized that was because those were the only ones who were coming out and saying, like, “My mom, I’ve been scammed.”

And most of the scammers I talked to, they were scamming men — but just for a few dollars. And the way they do it, like for example, Biggie, he pretends to be this beautiful white woman and tells the man he’s talking to, “If you send me $50, I’ll go to your house and we’ll spend the night together, but I need to pay money for gas.”

So there’s only a few times you can do that with the same person. Well, with women, the idea is that they establish a longer relationship, one that can endure months and even years. And I follow another character called Chibuke, who pretends to be a WWE fighter, and he scams an Irish woman for three, four years

CHAKRABARTI: To the point where she does some pretty extraordinary things, right, to continue the relationship?

BARRAGAN: Yes, yes. Obviously, I didn’t meet her because I didn’t want to intervene in the scam, and he was still scamming her when I met Chibuke. But Chibuke told me, and I saw it from the conversations, that she had endured 25 failed visits from Chibuke. Because the way they, these scammers make or steal money or make money is by telling the victim, “If you send me $500, I’ll book my flights now.”

And obviously, every time you don’t show up the other person becomes more wary, and, or you have their family who steps in and say, “You need to stop sending money.” Every time becomes harder. So the way they do it, and this only works for the most reckless scammers, as Chibuke was, is as you come up with wilder excuses.

And in the case of Chibuke, he even pretended to be the daughter of this WWE fighter. On the phone, he would pretend to be this little girl asking for money for her textbooks, for example, or for food. And, Theresa, the Irish woman, even thought even call her my daughter. So he had built this incredible castle of manipulations and lies that drew her in, and for her, it was like a maze.It was very hard to find the exit.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Carlos, I just, I could not help but to think when you were describing that Theresa in Ireland was being scammed as you were there in Nigeria investigating the Yahoo Boys, that had to present some ethical and moral quandaries for you, right? Because, Theresa could have been someone else’s mother.

And I was just thinking, like if you had known that there was a reporter there following the Yahoo Boys when your mom was being scammed, wouldn’t you want them to intervene?

BARRAGAN: Definitely, it was tough. It was very tough, and I think that as with any other underworld, criminal underworld investigations, you always have to confront certain ethical choices.

From the very beginning, I told myself I wouldn’t intervene in scams that were happening while I was reporting for several reasons. One was trust. These people were telling me their stories, and they were showing me their conversations with their victims. So if I reach out to the victim, then they wouldn’t share their secrets with me.

And two, I always told myself that I am a reporter and nothing else. My job is to tell these stories. And obviously, it was very painful, on a personal level, and on the professional level it was easier, but on a personal level it was harder because I empathize with Theresa. Theresa, at some points I thought that she could have been my mother, or she could have been the mother of a friend.

Yeah. So that was tough. And I would say that it was tougher because when you spend so much time interviewing these, these scammers, it’s not only the time I spent asking them questions. I spent time having drinks with them. I spent time waiting for buses, going to clubs, just following them.

And there were times that I forgot about the victims, and I found myself laughing with them, and they were just bragging about their exploits. So there were those times where I kept reminding myself that there was someone else on the other side.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I want to actually in a few minutes return the conversation to the people who are on the, the receiving end of these scams, who are being scammed. But, but in the book you write about how it seems like the activities in Nigeria of the Yahoo boys are not hidden, right? I mean, people know this is happening. It’s kind of out in the open. And it reminded me a lot of, the sort of the, the scammy operations that are almost, formal businesses in India, that they are allowed to persist in part because local law enforcement either just looks the other way or is complicit in the corruption, and I’m wondering if that’s, if that’s happening also in, in Nigeria.

BARRAGAN: Totally. Totally. I would talk about Lagos, and specifically about Ikotun, this neighborhood I chose to follow my characters who are from there. And Ikotun is very poor. In other parts of Lagos, Nigeria is a very unequal but wealthy country as well. So in Ikotun, people are very humble, hardworking.

So the moment you see a 16 or 18-year-old boy with an iPhone 17 and with boutique clothes and you could even see them stepping out of a Lexus car, everyone knows that he made money illegally. It’s just a fact. Or if they are in a hotel throw with money on the floor, as sometimes they literally do that, or buying champagne to kind of like show off to the community that they’ve made it.

And police officers I say this in the book, I never felt insecure in Lagos. People in Lagos always treated me with so much love and respect. But if at any time I felt danger, it was with the police because police there is quite corrupt. And if they chase Yahoo boys, it’s not because they want to end that scourge or they want to stop this, this scamming industry.

Sometimes, they would even dress up as Yahoo boys to find who was the Yahoo boy who just made it to detain him and go to an ATM and get all the money from the ATM. So that happens in Ikotun, that there’s a whole, not sure if I would call it industry, but like other areas of society that find ways to extract the money from the scammers themselves because in the end, these are teenagers who have no idea about life, and they burn their cash so quickly. And I’m talking about police officers, but also club owners, hotel managers, boutique owners, all sorts of people who, facing a very, facing economic hardship, they find ways to get their share of the pie.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now just, the details of how these scam operations work that you reveal in the book are so Interesting. And they’re almost, shocking in their simplicity sometimes because I suppose a lot of people are wondering, well, how does this cash end up in Nigeria in the hands of these young men? And you write about how gift cards are a really, really easy way to do that, right? I mean, how — the gift cards aren’t being sent in the mail to Lagos.

BARRAGAN: Well, I think my book, if anything, is it could have only been written in the 21st century because I don’t see it just as a tale of scams. It’s a tale of globalization. The way it works is that either by via crypto or via gift cards, they buy, you go to Walmart and you see all these gift cards, and basically, these scammers tell their victims, “You should buy a gift card.”

And the way it works is that the victim, once they buy the gift card, they send a picture of the code behind the gift card, and the scammer only has a code. He doesn’t have the money, but how does he get the money? So he resells that code to a network of vendors online. Normally, those vendors are Chinese vendors, obviously based in China or in Taiwan or wherever they are.

And why do they need these gift cards? Well, because they re-resell these gift cards to Chinese gamers, for example, who want to bypass the great firewall that China has erected to control American companies. And, Nigerian scammers have no idea that these gift cards are ending in the hands of a Chinese gamer who wants to play another game of Call of Duty.

But in the end, the gift card ends in the hands of the American company, and in the meantime, it has gone through all these illegal paths. And obviously, the Nigerian scammer might get just a percentage of the money of that gift card, and but they need the money quick, as with any other criminal activity they just want to launder the money very quickly.

CHAKRABARTI: That is incredible, Carlos. I mean, so it’s fascinating to imagine,  a person goes to the Target here in the United States, gets a $500 gift card, scratches off the back to reveal the number, and then through the, the magic of criminal creativity and the internet, it goes through Nigeria and ends up in the hands of a Chinese gamer. I mean, that’s… It’s just wild. Okay. There’s one thing that you confront in the book which I’m very grateful for because we’ve heard stories like this very frequently, that many people who resort to criminality will often say “poverty made me do it,” or “Corruption made me do it,” or, “Colonialization made me do it.” That essentially it’s the only option they have in being the victims of a larger system. But every time I hear this, I also think for each Yahoo boy, there’s 100 or 1,000 or even more equally young Nigerian people who are not resorting to criminal exploitation, who are still trying to make their way in Nigeria, and it makes it hard for me to have any pity or empathy for those who choose to scam others as their way out of this system.

BARRAGAN: Totally. Meghna, if at the beginning of the book my fear was that I was going to fall into the stereotype of the Nigerian scammer and I was going to do what many white or European writers have done in the past which is go to West Africa or go to other parts of the world and just be amazed by how exotic everything is and then stay on the surface.

Then my fear after so many months of reporting, of spending time with them, was that actually was getting too close with them. Their circumstances would justify everything. But in the end, I always told myself that I had to reach this fine balance because one thing is to understand how Chibuke came to be, but you also have to hold him accountable because as you have said, if you condone his actions, what about the guy who’s working for 30,000 naira a month, which is maybe right now, less than 30 euros a month and he goes to bed every day with his stomach growling, but he decides not to do it because he knows deep inside that it’s wrong?

So in the end, the book is a constant tension between free will and fate, and I think that the same way a reader told me that the book in a way is the choices people make when they feel they have no better option. But at the same time you do have an option. The only thing is that depending on your context, it might be a harder one. And to finish my point, I was also very wary of depicting Nigerian society in a very simplistic way. You get there and you find Nigerians who are deeply opposed Yahoo, others who think that this is just a small matter in a whole story of globalization and slavery and colonization. There are so many different views, and as with any complex story, I think you have to be willing to address all those issues.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, absolutely. And I just wanted to turn back to something that you have early in the book. You quote a Nigerian political writer, Ademola Adeeko who said that, quote, “If someone tells you that there’s nothing they can do apart from going into internet fraud, they’re lying. Nigeria is very dysfunctional. It’s a very dysfunctional country, but dysfunction also means a lot of opportunities. There are criminals who want to take the easy way out.” So you’re right. There are so many different perspectives, on every issue, but especially one like this, and I appreciate how you depicted all of those in the book. Going back to how this is really symptomatic of the modern world that we live in, I’m thinking back to Tinder and your mother and of course my first question was these platforms must have some responsibility for trying to keep fraud, fraudulent behavior off of their sites. Were you able to contact anyone at Tinder or any one of these sites and ask them about it?

BARRAGAN: I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to turn my book into an essay about social media. But it’s true that in a way it happens in the backyard. I would say that with social media, rather than focusing one company, social media has given us these unprecedented ways to connect with the strangers.

But if anything, the book just put, put as like a mirror in front of us to reveal how profoundly iso- is- isolated we are, and it feels like the only way we can reach that connection is by going to these social media companies. Kind of like a refuge from our own loneliness. But in the end, it feels that they are also profiting from our own loneliness, and they are very keen on making us stay there.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We did actually reach out to Tinder, and didn’t hear back from from them in time. But they do actually have, right on their website pretty strong statements about their approach to fraud. For example, they say, “We take the issue of fraud very seriously at Tinder. We have a zero tolerance policy for predatory behavior of any kind.”

They talk about a dedicated fraud team and their, their review process for fraudulent behavior, and they also warn that ultimately no one, whether they met on Tinder or not, should ever send money to someone they haven’t met in person. So that’s at least a little bit of what Tinder says on its website about fraud prevention.

So we, just have a couple of minutes left Carlos, and I’m wondering if we can go back to the victims of these scams. You were able to talk to some of them, and what did they, what did they tell you?

BARRAGAN: They felt completely misunderstood by society and mocked and pitied and a lot of condescension. They felt that their stories had not been told right, and one person told me that, I will never forget, she told me that she felt mentally raped after discovering that this man was not the person he said he was. Another woman told me that it felt like this was the saddest crime in the world because it was not only a financial loss but also a psychological one.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

BARRAGAN: And I think that if anything with the book, I try to show the reader that you can have both empathy for the scammer and for the victim. I’m not putting them on the same level, but because here one is a criminal and the other one is the victim, but you … Some people can argue that the scammer is also a victim of other forces, but that’s for another day.

I would say that, the same with my mom, once you read this whole story, you realize that this is not the failure of the individual. I think this is a collective failure. And at any point, I was not, directing that blame towards the people that were scamming as Chibuke and Biggie.

But as a question to to us, to the people who live in these countries, are we doing things the right way? How is it possible that a war veteran in the U.S. falls for this 14-year-old kid? What are the societies that we are building? Is this the kind of world we want to live in? Is this the kind of world we want our parents to be? So in the end, I try to leave or finish the book with more questions than answers, so readers can find them.

CHAKRABARTI: And by the way, I mean, romance scams, according to a Nasdaq report, are one of the fastest growing kinds of scams online. Like, almost $4 billion in global losses in 2024. It’s just astonishing. We have about 30 seconds left, Carlos, and I have to return to your mom, Sylvia. How is she doing today? Is she, is she in the dating world?

BARRAGAN: She’s not. She doesn’t trust the online dating apps or even social media, but she’s still trying. She tells me, “Every time you get interviewed, remind listeners I’m still looking.” And I think that’s a very nice, note to end, like the idea that you have to keep trying. But also that in a world in which we are constantly online, you have to reach out to the people you love. You have to stay connected because in the end, we are looking for connection.

So if you don’t get that connection, people might go very far to feel understood and heard and seen.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.