So we know that as we read the book, we kind of know the answer to this one, but what motivated you to write the book and how long did it take to do the research?

So thank you so much.

My mom is a single mom and for the most part, she took care of me and my two older brothers.

So back in 2015, I told her, why don't you join a dating app? You know, it was a very different time from now.

The internet was a different place.

And she did join a dating app, and she met this wonderful American soldier who was posted in Syria, or at least he told my mom he was.

And my mom immediately fell for him and they started exchanging these very passionate emails for me and my brothers.

Talk a little bit about that story, and then what drew you to follow this beyond Lagos?

And a lot of this is down to colonialism.

Yeah, it's very curious because, first of all, Nigeria...

it was a creation from the British Empire.

They united different parts of what we know as Nigeria, which is something that led to a lot of instability in the future.

And some Nigerian writers believe that when the creation, when it became an independent state, it shouldn't have been Nigeria.

But in the early years of Nigeria, British emissaries were so...

British emissaries were so aggressive to West Africans that some people, some locals, started to dress up as the white man with the white man's clothes to take advantage of that fear and maybe ask for cattle to other ethnic groups or to other tribes.

Did you speak to them about AI? I mean, it wasn't really a big thing at that point.

Can we talk broadly now about the Yahoo Boys? I mean, Carlos, how does it work? Is there like a playbook? I mean, how does an 18 year old Nigerian young fella learn how to scam a middle aged American doctor or a Spanish woman for that matter? How does he know the language to use, you know, the way to talk? How does he learn that?

First of all, most of them, they don't know.

And they fail at it.

It's a crime that requires practice.

You learn through practice.

But in the book, I tell the story of Aziz, who is a small boy, 14 years old.

And I was very keen on telling his story because he was starting on the scam when I met him.

And he's 14.

How does that play out?

Yeah, totally, because it's, it's very important to say these, for me, these were just a minority of the population.

Uh, many more young men, uh, decided to not engage in these criminal activities, and it was a hard decision for them because they were making way less money than, uh, their friends.

And, you know, you have these situations in hotels where maybe a hotel worker is making 30,000 naira a month, which maybe is, like, 30 euros or even less, and then these scammers could come with all their illicit money, and they would start throwing on onto the floor to kind of, like, tell the worker, "You're gonna pick it up from the floor," and tell him, "I'm better than you." Uh, so it requires a very strong moral, uh, stand to, uh, decide, "I'm not going to do this." And I think this doesn't speak for, like, uh, for just Nigeria.

This is a s- s- situation where, uh- All human beings have been at some point, and it just depends whether life is easier or, or more difficult.

But as I said, a lot of Nigerians, they oppose, uh, Yahoo, or the Yahoo culture, because ...

Not only because of the harm it creates, but for two things.

Carlos, after you've taken us on this huge journey into the homes and the lives of so many different people, I'm wondering how you're seeing people on both sides of this equation differently, and what you want us to be thinking about as we read this book.

What's been happening?

Yes, I just came from a, a demonstration organized by a right-wing commentator and an activist.

Uh, he drew around 1,000 people, and they supported him, they cheered him.

But there were also some counter protesters who didn't want him there.

He-- they accused him of, uh, taking advantage of the situation.

And, uh, these people, mainly from Moroccan descent, but obviously residents, they said that they were the ones who had cleaned the city.

They were the ones who had pushed the migrants out.

What have people there been saying to you? I think you've been talking not only to residents, but also to some of the people who came in during the course of the week, and also to some of the Spanish soldiers trying to escort them back over the border.

Carlos Barragán, a reporter with The New York Times, is in Ceuta, and I asked him about the mood there

thereWell, I could say that today on Sunday morning, the city is cautiously returning to normal.

It took a while for residents to come out on the streets.

On Saturday, there were just a few people walking the streets because they had hunkered down on Friday as, uh, tens of thousands of migrants roamed the city.

But as, uh, authorities, police officers, and soldiers moved these Moroccan young men towards the border, more people are coming out.

The thing is that on Saturday evening, there was some far-right politician who came here saying that he wanted to expulse all the immigrants, and there was hundreds of local residents who shouted at him saying that he was conflating being an illegal immigrant with being a Muslim, and the police had to drive him out because tensions were flaring.

What are locals saying, the people who live in Ceuta all the time?

Well, they, they feel abandoned.

Yeah.

Totally, totally.

I would talk about Lagos and specifically about Ikotun, this neighborhood I chose to follow my characters who are from there.

And you know, 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 know, you could even see them stepping out of a Lexus car.

And what did they tell you?

Could you just let the listeners know, please, how you first came across and found out about the Yahoo boys?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, of course.

If you read my book, I think the readers will get familiarized with my personal life and my family a bit, at least in the first 20 to 30 pages.

So I am a...

Spanish citizen.

I was born in Madrid and I grew up in Madrid most of my life.

So the way it works

I'm not, I'm not engaging in gang violence, and I just have to spend some time on my phone and stay up all night.

night.I think this is a problem of globalization and, uh, extreme inequality.

When in the past you were living in a city that was, that had a lot of, uh, inequality, in the long run, either was going to lead to social instability or to authoritarianism to control, uh, that, uh, instability.

What happened with the internet is that suddenly these people in Nigeria, but it could also happen in other parts of the world, they had a window into our riches.

And that social instability, maybe they are now burning bridges because they can't get to America, but they are talking to lonely people and they're scamming them.

And certainly there's also, um, the aftershocks of colonialism and slavery, and the British Empire creating a country out of nowhere.

Um, so in the book, for example, you have this character who is Biggie's, uh, grandfather, who had to dress up as a, as a woman during the civil war that in a way was also impacted by, uh, the British misrule in West Africa.

What, what is that?

Did you do either?

Well, for sure not the police.

As a reporter, my ethical, uh, guidelines are that I protect my sources.

It was harder with the victims because sometimes they were scamming people in real time, and I thought if I just told them, in the case of Chibuke, for example, he's a young scammer in Lagos, scamming an Irish woman, and for four years, he gets 80,000 euros from her.

She is losing everything.

It's a hard choice, but if I told the victims, why would the scammers share their stories with me?

Did you have any concerns as you wrote the book, though, that in your efforts to humanize those carrying out these crimes, that you were in some way giving the impression there was a justification for it?

Totally.

I've been talking to Carlos about his investigation and his personal reason for starting it.

So my mom divorced my father.

They divorced in, uh, 2004, and she struggled finding a stable partner until in 2015 I told her, "Why don't you join Tinder?" And she did, and she met this American soldier, a beautiful man living in Syria who was posted there.

But from the beginning, it sounded very off.

After a few weeks, my mom was saying that she was already in love with Brian, this American soldier, and Brian was telling my mom he wanted to move to Spain to live with her, which was striking because they'd been talking for maybe a few weeks.

And I would say that the alarms went off when Brian sent a message to my mom saying, "I'm going to send some gold bars I found in Syria in a terrorist stash, and with the money we get from the gold bars, we're gonna buy a house and we're gonna start a new life together." By then, my mom had already bought two rings, one for her, one for Brian, so you can imagine how invested she was in, in, in it.

And I started doing some research, and I found that this was the playbook of a romance scam, the American soldier scam, and I knew it was going to t-take hard evidence to convince my mom, so I traced the IP email address.

Did you do either?

And I've been talking to Carlos about his investigation and why he started it.

So my mom divorced my father.

They divorced in 2004.

And she struggled finding a stable partner until in 2015, I told her, why don't you join Tinder? And she did, and she met this American soldier, a beautiful man living in Syria, who was posted there.

But from the beginning, it sounded very off.

After a few weeks, my mom was saying that she was already in love with Brian, this American soldier.

And Brian was telling my mom he wanted to move to Spain to live with her, which was striking because they'd been talking for maybe a few weeks.

To do that, you first of all have to find them and presumably they're not advertising where they are.

Living...?

In Madrid.

We a- we are from Spain, and we are three brothers, and I'm the youngest.

So I encouraged my mom, "Why don't you join Tinder?" You know, it was a different time, 2015.

And she met this wonderful, beautiful American soldier.

It all sounded very weird, because he said he was in Syria, and he was in the military, but my mom fell for it.

And they started talking by email, and at some point the guy told my mom he was going to s- ship some gold bars to her house.

in the, in the West, and that you prey on people's loneliness, right?

Hmm.

Because what they saw that the white people were bringing was so scary to them that they suddenly decided to take advantage of that and do it to their own ... maybe not their own population, maybe to other people in other, um, areas.

Now, you fast-forward to time of independence, and Nigeria was created, as I said, because of the British decided to, uh, unite two different regions, and because, uh, for their own purposes, it was very beneficial in terms of the money.

And when you get to independence, there are different tribal groups that suddenly are part of a country, and you have a democracy, you have elections.

And this in 19- in the, the '60s, the mistrust is rampant.

Once the British, uh, leave, this leads to a, a civil war.

Of course, you cannot say that the scams are because colonialism or the civil war happened because of the British.

But yeah, I was wondering how, uh, if you could talk about, a little bit about the gender dynamics within, within your book.

Tell me how.

So I don't think I would call it disaster.

Probably because first, my mom didn't lose any money.

And second, we turn it into kind of like a family joke.

But I'm going to explain to listeners what happened.

So in 2015, my mother came to me and told me, I've met someone on Tinder.

And, you know, my parents divorced in early 2000s.

What's Yahoo Plus?

How do you explain that?

You can't.

I think one of the main takeaways I've taken from, like, following these people, these scammers, spending time with them, reading these conversations, seeing how lonely people in the West are, and I never contacted Theresa because the scam was still ongoing.

I didn't because Chibuke was still talking to her, and I didn't want to get in the way, because otherwise I would have stopped being a reporter and, you know, I would have changed reality.

But it's just the core question of the book, right? How and why are these victims sending money to these boys when sometimes it's so obvious this is a scam? The way Theresa was scammed by Chibuke, because she thought she was talking to a WWE fighter, the way it worked is that she sent him 300 euros the first time, the first payment, and the idea was that if she sent that money, she was going to meet him at some point.

The way it works is that you keep coming up with, uh, different excuses that, as you say, you ha- they have to become more and more wild, if I can put it like that, because, you know, okay, you might scam me once, twice, but what about, like, five times? What about 15 times? And what Chibuke did was put more and more and more pressure on her.

You know, she would, he would play with her feelings, and it is more dangerous because you are hijacking another person's mind.

Tell me what you did.

You know, what do you think will protect a child like Aziz from getting into this thing?

Let's say first, I'm sure there are smarter people than me who can read this book and come up with good answers to your question.

But because of you, I'm going to give it a try.

I think it's all about community.

I think from what like older people who were very against this crime in Ecotune would tell me, or even people there told me, in the 90s or early 2000s, if you came home with an iPhone, your father would slap you because they knew immediately where you had gotten that.

Obviously, in terms of what is going on with religion is also an important part.

There were some cele churches happening in Ikotun that was a bit disorienting.

And what did she teach you about, quote-unquote, Yahoo girls, and about the limits of trauma as an explanation for cruelty? Because we've talked about this earlier, but I just want to flesh it out from the point of view of a kind of like a Yahoo girl, quote-unquote.

Tell us, I, I mean, how did you come to report on this world of scammers?

So long story short, uh, my own mom, who was a single mother, she was texting on Tinder, and she met an American soldier who was posted in Syria.

After, uh, I would say a month of texting with this man, my mom was fairly in love with him, and she was convinced he was moving to Madrid to live with her.

At some point, I w- became so suspicious that I traced this guy's email address, and I found out he was texting my mom from Lagos.

For my mom, it was very, I would say, fairly devastating.

A few years later in, during the pandemic, the lockdowns in Spain were so hard, and my mom was so lonely that I kept thinking about my mom's scammer.

But I couldn't find him, so I decided to move to Lagos and try to meet these scammers.

Um, what did you learn about loneliness in writing this?

What was it specifically about these four people that demonstrated the Ya- what the Yahoo's life like, life, Yahoo Boy's lifestyle was?

Well, as you mentioned, these kind of scams are also originate in other parts of the world, like Southeast Asia, where there are or- organized, uh, syndicates, and it's more like enslaved people doing these kind of scams.

But in Nigeria, they're doing it, uh- Out of free will.

So they are facing moral dilemmas all the time.

Uh, obviously the fact that so many young men, because it's ...

You find a lot of these young men on the streets doing it.

The fact that so many people are doing it reveals that it, they are not psychopaths.

What is the reputation of Yahoo boys in Nigeria?

How does he know the language to use, you know, the way to talk? H- How does he learn that?

First of all, most of them, they don't know, and they fail at it.

It's a crime that requires practice.

You learn through practice.

But in the book, I tell the story of Aziz, who is a small boy, 14 years old, and I was very keen on telling his story because he was starting out in the scam when I met him.

He looked so young.

He's, his English was kind of broken.

And having spent three years looking at their lives and talking to them and seeing how they make money in this pretty cruel business of romance scams, do you go along with that? Do you go along that they're, they're just doing what they have to do?

There was like a 14-year-old.

Yeah, well, you need to bear in mind that average age of Nigeria is 18 years old.

So it's a very young society where unemployment is still quite high.

So there's no job for them that would provide as much as these scams provide.

When you talk about criminal activities...

It's very easy to say very quickly that you condemn those activities.

And it's true, you know, like some of these people, some of these scammers, they harm other people in real ways.

How did that change, if at all, how you thought about these romance scams?

Can you paint us a picture of how they typically unfold?

unfold?Yeah.

So most of these young boys, what they do is with their phone, they buy a very cheap phone, and basically, uh, because they are mostly scamming Americans, they spend their nights talking to them.

They meet them on Facebook, they meet them on Twitter, on Instagram, and they just a simple message, "Hi honey, how are you?" And they start talking, and sometimes they spend the whole night talking to them, and they take a lot of drugs to keep awake, and that could go on and on for days and weeks and months.

And then they start developing a relationship, and then at some point they ask for money, but before, it's all about building trust.

And how they do that, they do that by expressing love, expressing affection, because they know that once the victim is sharing their most private life, their most private thoughts, then they kind of like have the victim.

And again, it requires a lot of patience and a lot of work.

Can you talk about how loneliness showed up in your book from both perspectives and what you learned?

Chibuke, can you sketch out his rise and fall? How did he get into scamming, and then what happened from there?

So first, it's very important to understand because when I first came to Lagos, I thought that I was going to encounter a very sophisticated industry of scams as, you know, you have those scams in other parts of the world.

But what I discovered was the opposite.

It was mostly young people, young men in their 20s who were just learning from their older friends and older brothers how to fool Westerners, how to scam lonely people.

So in the case of Chibuke, he's a g- guy from a very poor community with no dad and with a mother who, in his own words, didn't care for him.

So because he was looking for some sort of camaraderie between the people around him, he engaged in these scams as well because older people in the neighborhood, they were doing exactly that.

So at the beginning, he didn't make any money.

So some people just, you know, are impersonate with somebody living in the next town over, but then there are these celeb scams, which is what you're talking about here, where they impersonate somebody very famous and, and that's what Chibuke landed on as his, his lucrative scam.

And that's what Chibuque landed on as his lucrative scam.

Exactly.

I've encountered scammers who were impersonating Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Brad Pitt, you name it.

In the case of Chibuque, he was doing WWE scams because his stepfather used to see these fights.

And in the end, he started talking to an Irish woman named Theresa, and the scam went for years.

At the beginning, she sent him 300 euros, and that kept piling up to a point where he made tens of thousands of euros.

Of course, it came bit by bit in his own words, and it came in the form of gift cards, as I explained in the book.

Can you kind of describe what that looks like when you're walking down the street?