Carlos Barragán

 

Nigerian romance scams are not what you think

Loneliness on both sides of the phone.

 

Fourteen-year-old Azeez used an alter ego, Vanessa, to trick lonely American men in romance scams.Carlos Barragán

 

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

Most nights, once his mother and baby sister had fallen asleep on the room’s single bed, Azeez sat on the floor in the dark, pulled out his phone, and tried to figure out how to extract money from a stranger on the other side of the planet. He was 14. He lived in Ikotun, a neighborhood in northwestern Lagos, Nigeria, where Azeez’s mother paid 4,000 naira a month, about six dollars, for a space with a dirt floor just large enough to fit a wardrobe and a bed. The men Azeez wrote to lived mostly in California, which to him was an interesting, exotic place. When one of them asked where she lived — “she” being his alter ego, Vanessa, a blond American woman whose photographs he had lifted from a pornographic actress’s online profile — Azeez would simply type the name of the man’s town into Google alongside the words “thirty minutes away.”

He was not good at it. For the first few months he made no money. He asked for cash too early, or answered the wrong question, or went quiet when a man said something he didn’t understand. Only a few months earlier, he had been playing a video game called Truck Simulator, where he had to pick up freight cargo in the United States and drop it at the right address while obeying American traffic laws. Now he was learning the country in a different way: just by its appetites. Azeez had never had a girlfriend. He held only a childlike notion of what the men he spent hours chatting with sought. Many of the lines he used on them came from downloaded scripts.

 

I know all this because I spent the better part of three years traveling to Ikotun to interview dozens of Nigerian romance scammers, popularly known as “Yahoo Boys,” a moniker tied to the Yahoo! email accounts they used in the early 2000s. When I met Azeez, he agreed to patiently reconstruct his own experience as a budding scammer. There was no crime syndicate, no camp where elders trained recruits. There was only this: a cheap phone, an older friend who advised him to stop wasting his life on games and start making money like everyone else, and a folder of scripts — known as “formats” — that he found by typing “dating maga format” into the same search bar he used to figure out almost everything else. (In the language of Nigerian romance scammers, “maga” is the word for the mark; no relation to Donald Trump’s MAGA.) The formats describe ways to seduce strangers with the goal of reaching a payout, which usually involves coming up with excuses to convince the maga to buy a gift card and share the code.

 

Azeez memorized them, the same way he had memorized the rules of the road in Truck Simulator.

I had not come to Lagos to meet Azeez. I had come to find the man who had tried to run a romance scam on my mother, and I never did. What I found instead were thousands of young men and a few women, some barely older than children, earning a living by scamming other people by pretending to be their online lovers. I had expected either to be repelled by them or to learn something sophisticated enough to account for how a woman as sharp as my mother could’ve been taken in. Yet my interviewees consistently disappointed me. They repeated the same three points: White people are too trusting; white people fall in love too easily; the key thing is attention.

I kept thinking: How could anyone be fooled by this?

It took me a long time to understand that the boys were not failing to explain the con. They were explaining it, and I was refusing to hear it: their unsophisticated approach was the best way to exploit our loneliness.

Alone again (naturally)

My mother, a successful dentist, raised three sons largely alone after a difficult divorce, moving us with aplomb through a series of rented apartments in Madrid. When she told us, over Sunday lunch in December 2015, that she had met a man on Tinder, none of us thought much of it. His name was Brian. He was a handsome American soldier of 52, deployed, he said, to Syria.

As the online relationship progressed, one of my brothers, an air force pilot, scoffed at a soldier who could somehow never manage a video call. After that, my mother grew quieter about Brian and confided mostly in me. She showed me their emails, his studded with spelling and writing errors. So what, I thought. The man is probably busy. Then Brian announced that he would soon ship her several bars of gold he had recovered from a terrorist’s stash — if only she could help with the customs fees — and my brother messaged me: It’s a scam. I found an app that could trace the email to the place it was sent from. Brian’s messages were not coming from Syria. They were coming from Lagos. My mother’s face went white. Within a week she had deleted everything and announced, laughing, that she was done with men.

 

That should have been the end of it. Then the pandemic came and my mother grew anxious and then depressed. I broke the lockdown rules to spend time with her. She would tell me she felt lonely as we watched the evening news, the rising death count. And I, swamped and frightened and self-pitying, would think: What about me? Am I invisible? I called her selfish. You don’t understand what it’s like when no one needs you, she replied. You don’t understand what it means to be alone.

The truth was that the loneliness had been there long before Brian, and before the pandemic. Even though she was intelligent and funny, she could not find a suitable partner. She offered up various justifications: The men of her generation couldn’t abide a woman who outearned them. She was too particular. Or it was simply fate, some sort of offset for the luck she’d had elsewhere in life. As she once put it to me: “Is this the price I have to pay for having three wonderful kids?”

And here’s what a part of me did not want to examine: When a woman like my mother is taken in by a scammer far away, we tell her story with a curdled mix of pity and mockery, as though it were a failure of individual intelligence rather than the predictable result of an isolation we had watched build for years. We stigmatize the victim partly so that we never have to ask how she came to be so vulnerable.

The hours

A few years later, when I was living in New York, I interviewed many victims. Their accounts of the scams were often baroque: shifting characters, tangled subplots, elaborate criminal machinery. None of it matched what I had seen and heard in my reporting in Nigeria. For a while I couldn’t close the gap, until I realized what some of them were doing: telling the story in such a way that having believed the scammer would make sense. A sophisticated international operation can fool anyone. A boy from the slums with a script, in theory, should not. So I stopped asking the victims how the con had worked and started asking about their lives. Some had no real family left. Many had not spoken to a friend in years. Almost all of them lived online and carried old wounds: a death, a divorce, a betrayal. When a beautiful, attentive stranger contacted them and offered them a story, they held on to it. Not because it was necessarily plausible but because it made them feel seen. Every “good morning” offered a fresh reason to get out of bed.

 

In the United States and Europe, romance scammers are often pictured as foot soldiers of an international cartel. I once called the head of one of the largest romance-scam victims’ groups in America. When I suggested that the boys I had met in Lagos belonged to no mafia, he threatened to hang up and told me I was a terrible reporter. Over time, I came to understand his fury. H.L. Mencken wrote that “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” The cartel is that easy solution. It is easier to believe that your father, your friend, or you yourself were defeated by an international syndicate than by a hungry teenager with a smartphone, too much time, and too little hope.

I have come to realize that both victims and scammers distort their experience in ways that mirror each other. The victim inflates the scam into a vast conspiracy because in our society being the victim of a conspiracy is worthy of empathy; being the victim of loneliness is not. The scammer, on his side, deflates his crimes — it’s white people’s fault, they just fall in love too easily, it’s payback for colonialism — because the alternative would be to recognize that he is committing a deeply shameful sin: stealing from someone’s vulnerable relative.

Only once you accept that the person chatting up your relative might be any man in his 20s, any boy who must ask an older friend what “doing a 69” means, you can see that what beats us is not their sophistication. It is our need. The scammer’s discovery is that what works is basic attendance. “Good morning, babe!” is the most important message you can send, a scammer told me.

 

This is why they study us the way Azeez studied California — googling our towns, learning our holidays, memorizing our breakfast routines — and why they are, in a twisted sense, our most ruthless experts. They read our isolation more clearly than we do because they come at it from the outside. Their explanations sound banal to us because we cannot bear the simple truth: that Nigeria’s poverty and lack of opportunity has led thousands of young men to build lives shaped around our loneliness.

Even the Yahoo Boys’ habits show this deformation: The more a scammer comes to rely on the scam, the longer he must stay awake at night chatting with clients in different time zones and the more drugs he must consume to keep himself awake, squandering the money he stole. And it is a lot of money, multiplied by the weakness of Nigeria’s currency. By 2022, Americans were losing well over a billion dollars a year to romance fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Some of that is going to Southeast Asia, where international syndicates have indeed enslaved people to turn them into unlikely romance scammers; there, at least, the popular conception of a sophisticated criminal syndicate is vindicated. Another chunk is going to West Africa, where these boys are farming our isolation with the implicit approval of the tech platforms.

Which, of course, should not and does not absolve them. Their crimes are serious — and have tragic consequences. But it’s still important to remember that boys like Azeez have not had easy lives. Not long ago, Azeez came to Lagos on a four-hour bus ride he took sitting on his grandmother’s lap because they could afford only one seat; he was left with a mother he barely knew, and for months he sat alone at the entrance of his building watching strangers pass, with no one his age to play with and no school willing to take him. He learned to read the loneliness of men in California, I think, partly because he was fluent in it himself. Western isolation on one side, Nigerian poverty on the other. A phone set between them like a bridge, showing each of them a distorted glimpse of the other’s life. A particularly morbid form of connection.

 

A child who scams a stranger out of a gift card is, in part, the product of a country that has failed him. We should not absolve individuals of their responsibility, and Azeez has certainly come to regret many of his life choices (he has left scamming and is training to become a tailor). But it’s impossible not to recognize that inflation and a collapsed Nigerian economy offer young people scant opportunity. In the last few years, those pressures have turned an activity once seen as a shameful last resort into something a Lagos mother might now wish on her son even if the returns are modest; Azeez made less than $200 in a year and a half.

My mother dated a little after Brian, but never seriously, and she will still, now and then, mention that whenever she hears John Legend’s “All of Me,” she thinks of him. For those few weeks, the man who did not exist was her most attentive partner. He understood what she was starved for and supplied it better than the world around her.

What he could not do was keep her. Thank God. It was my brother who first said the word “scam” and I who traced the emails to Lagos. We handled all of it clumsily. And yet even at her loneliest, my mother had that: people who were there for her. Many of the hardest-hit victims have no one at all who will reach out. The question is: Why not? Who is responsible? The answer might be scarier than we think.