Inside the world of Nigeria’s ‘Yahoo Boys’

Natasha still hadn’t responded to Brett’s latest heartbreak message. If she was who she said she was, her silence would have been insensitive. But given the truth that Natasha Bridges never existed, her true cruelty may have been the answer.

The person sending messages to Brett, James, and dozens of other American men was named Richard, but preferred to be called Biggie. He was 28 years old from Nigeria. The photo he used on his Facebook account pretending to be Natasha, a 32-year-old single mother from Wisconsin with an interest in economic development and cryptocurrencies, was stolen from the social media of a real woman named Jennifer. He used different accounts to pose as a gym instructor and a lone American soldier deployed overseas.

I knew all this because Biggie was sitting on a green couch in his hotel room in Lagos, playing video games. pro evolution soccer 17 When asked why he would ghost Brett while reading a private message he had sent to an unsuspecting foreigner on his iPhone 6, Biggie, who had scored yet another goal for Australia in the Asian Cup final against Japan, shrugged his shoulders. I shrugged it off. “Brother, that’s what I was trying to tell you. Being a Yahoo boy is so stressful,” he said without taking his eyes off the game. “Do you think it’s easy to make someone like you? The hustle is just like real life, the only difference is you have to pretend to be someone else.”

In Nigeria, Yahoo boys are online scammers. Their nickname comes from Yahoo, an email service that became popular in Nigeria in the 2000s, and are descendants of the notorious 419 scammers. First in letters and later in emails, he promised to help strangers get rich for a nominal advance. . (This number refers to the section on fraud in the Nigerian Penal Code.) Biggie is a particular kind of Yahoo boy. He is a romance scammer who pretends to be someone else online to lure foreigners into trusting him and handing over their money.

Biggy’s game is all about intimacy. He invests time in building what appears to be a real relationship with his victims. He flatters, jokes, asks intimate questions. “The most important thing as a Yahoo Boy is to keep the conversation alive,” Biggie told me. “Dating is all about patience. It takes a long time for a customer to start trusting you.”

The Yahoo boys have learned that they love euphemisms.

Biggie estimates that during his 10 years as a romance scammer, and continuing to do so, he has lined his pockets with $30,000 from the people he scammed. People who yearn for love. People like my mother.

Hello, Sylvia how are you? I’m Brian. We contacted each other on Tinder. I hope you are having a great day. I would be very happy if we could get to know each other more. To answer your question, I was once married, but currently divorced and single.

I would appreciate it if you could contact me soon.

warm hug
brian adkins
Carmel, NY 10512
[email protected]

By many standards, my mother, Sylvia, is a successful woman. She opened her own dental clinic in Spain before she turned 30 and served her approximately 10,000 patients over the next 20 years. She married and gave birth to three boys, I am the youngest. But her divorce from her father in 2003, when she was 44, was a tumultuous and costly one. After we separated, my siblings and I mostly lived with my mother in various rented apartments around Madrid. For a long time, her only asset was an old Citroen C1. Most of her income was spent on food, education, and annual vacations with us. “Books and travel, no matter what, there’s always money at home for that,” she said.

One day in December 2015, my mother’s face seemed brighter than usual. She told us at lunch on Sunday that she had met someone. They connected on Tinder, an app I encouraged her to use. The man was a handsome 52-year-old divorced American soldier named Brian. Her mother told her that her feelings were real and so were Brian’s feelings.

At first, neither my brother nor I paid much attention. Jaime and Miguel were still in their 20s and just starting their careers. I was 19 years old at the time, and although I was the only one in my family still living at home, I was busy with university studies. It was like ambient noise that my mother’s romance was blooming. However, when she later tells him that Brian is on a mission in Syria, Miguel, a Spanish Air Force pilot, scoffs. “Now, do you really believe that? That’s sketchy,” he said.

After that, my mom shared updates about her new love more subtly, mostly with me. She showed me some long and passionate emails she had with Brian. Although she was studying English in high school, she still used her Google Translate to better express her thoughts. Brian’s message also had some grammatical errors, and I thought, “So what?”

“Sometimes I say to Brian, ‘You’re going too fast!'” my mother confided in me. She said the same in a message to him:

I hope we can spend many years together. I think love in a couple is the way to go, I’m sure our beginnings are good, and I like it. We have different situations. My life is very comfortable, but yours is not. I’m surrounded by friends and family, but you’re just with other disgusting men like you. So…that’s it. I understand that you are clinging to me, and in some ways I am very grateful, but in other ways I feel a little anxious about the responsibility of what you expect of me.

Whatever doubts she had, the joy she felt overcame them. One day she came home with her two rings. One for herself and she had one for Brian. “He’s coming to Spain,” she said with a laugh. He tells her that he wants to quit her army and be with her.

Now my brothers and I are officially worried. We asked her if she had ever had a video call with Brian. When she said no, we told her that we thought it was fishy that she had never even taken any photos of her, except for a few photos of her. saw A man who claimed to love her. We got into an argument and her mother locked herself in her bedroom, hurt that her sons didn’t support her. “I’m going to talk to her boyfriend,” she said before closing the door.

In early January 2016, about five weeks after my mother first contacted Brian, I received a message from Jamie as I was studying in the library for my microeconomics exam. “Carlos, we have to do something,” he wrote. I could feel his anxiety behind the bubbles on his phone screen. “This man told my mother that he was going to send her some solid gold bars that he had found in a terrorist stash,” Jamie continued. “That’s a scam.”