Carlos Barragán has traveled to Nigeria to see from the inside how the Nigerian scam industry works
His mother was tricked by a scammer who pretended to be an American soldier in Syria
What can lead someone to fall in love with a stranger on the internet and end up placing all their trust in him? Most of the time, loneliness. And, on many of these occasions, the romance ends up being revealed as a scam.
What can lead someone to travel to Nigeria to try to find out who is the person who tried to scam them? If you’re a journalist, finding a good story and, incidentally, The guy who cheated on your own mother.
It is the case of Carlos Barragan (Madrid, 1996). A reporter (former El Confidencial, currently at Columbia University, USA) who has been both a chronicler and protagonist of this story. In 2015, his mother, Silvia, met a man on Tinder and the spark immediately ignited. He claimed to be an American soldier who was reserving in the Syrian war. And that he wanted to start a new life in Europe with her. He claimed to be…
Despite all the warnings and red flags that her three children were hinting at her, she was excited. An attentive man with a sense of humor with whom she spoke on a daily basis and whom she even once referred to as “my boyfriend”. Silvia came to buy two rings for when Brian finally arrived in Spain. But that never happened.
As is often the case in these types of scams, most of which come from Nigeria, the next step is to ask the victim for money (or client, as scammers call the unsuspecting people they fleece). Brian was going to send the woman some mysterious gold bars that he claimed to have seized from terrorists. With them they could live the rest of their lives. She only had to take care of paying the 5,000 euros for customs and… life resolved.
That’s where his kids got involved. They showed him that all that was scam (a fraud) and that Brian didn’t exist. She realized then that she had been deceived. And although the scammer did not get a single euro cent out of him, there are more painful wounds than those left by money. A divorced, reserved and dreamy woman, colliding with reality: she had fallen in love with someone who doesn’t exist and she only wanted to take advantage of her.
The effect of disappointment never quite left. On the contrary, it manifested itself more strongly five years later, during the loneliness of the 2020 pandemic confinement. Carlos Barragán, the youngest of her three children, skipped mobility restrictions to go see her. And from those conversations Carlos’s idea ended up being born: he would go to Lagos (Nigeria) to try to find out who that fake Brian was and how Nigerian scammers work.
They are called Yahoo Boys. People who dedicate themselves full time to trying to scam people online with various methods. From sentimental strategies (impersonating another person and making a victim fall in love through social networks) to the classic one of the overthrown prince who needs help to get his huge fortune out of the country. Previous payment, yes, of an amount (ridiculous if one believes the final reward) of which the unwary must take charge. Or the guy who sells a big car for four bucks because he’s going to live in England and the steering wheel is on the other side. After receiving the money, the groom/prince/car salesman disappears forever. Because it never existed.
vulnerable heart
“My mother, divorced, always focused on taking care of her three children. But she was never very successful in love. She was frustrated in that regard. In fact, it was me, her youngest son, who introduced her to the Tinder app and encouraged her to install it on his mobile to meet people”, Carlos Barragán now tells EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA, from the Prensa Ibérica group, from a modest apartment in Lagos. Because Carlos has collected that experience and is capturing it in a book. He has just published a long excerpt in the American magazine Atavist.
“It was in 2015 when my brothers and I realized that his face was lighting up. He had met someone online and he was excited. He showed us a very elaborate profile, a very attractive US military man. Many photos, which they steal from other profiles,” she recalls now. Her children were suspicious from the start and that caused some family discussions. But she went ahead.
“These scammers immediately kick you out of Tinder, because you can’t send photos there. They take you to Whatsapp, to email, to Google Hangouts, to Facebook chat or to any other form of more intimate communication in which more material can be shared. A material that is credible, because these scammers have spent years working those profiles”.
The long-distance relationship was maintained until 2016, when the fake soldier took the final step for the scam. He told her that he was going to send gold bars confiscated in Syria to some terrorists. She explained it to her children: “My mother is an intelligent, educated person, a reader. She has a dental clinic. I think that deep down she always had doubts and that is why she kept informing her children. She herself came to tell us on one occasion that Brian was going too fast. When she told about the ingots, her son Jaime (Carlos’s older brother) told her clearly: “Mom, I’m sorry, but there will be no gold. End of story“. It was the beginning of the end of the fake romance.
“I discovered an email tracking app, to find out where it came from. I tested it with an email from my father, who lived in China. And that night I sat my mother on the sofa and as delicately as possible I showed her that The emails that this Brian sent him did not come from Syria, but from Nigeria. I remember she said ‘oh my goodness, I’m stupid’ and she realized everything right away,” Carlos recalls now, in a videoconference that often drops due to the quality of the Nigerian internet network. He is still there researching to write his book.
yahoo boys
A priori there were no more dramas and that episode ended up being part of family folklore. Silvia ended up taking it humorously and downplayed it. She still laughs when she remembers the topic. But the 2020 pandemic arrived and it was Carlos who noticed the loneliness of his mother. Her three children had gone to live outside of her: “I would skip the restrictions to go visit her. And when I saw her alone, I thought of the Nigerian“, confesses the Madrid journalist.
Carlos, who at that time was already preparing to go to the columbia university With a creative writing grant from the La Caixa Foundation, he saw that it was time to get 100% involved. She decided that she was going to travel to Nigeria to try to find Brian or, failing him, the professional con men who live off these scams. Out of pure professional interest and his emotional involvement.
“How did you come up with going there? Because from the beginning I saw that it was a story that had many angles and that was very complex. Everything that has been published about the Yahoo Boys are very one-dimensional stories. They paint it very caricatured. They do it because of poverty or because their grandparents were slaves and now they take from the whites what they took from their ancestors. But I wanted to get into these guys’ room, see how they are, how they do it, how they live, how they laugh. And I saw a very powerful story doing a first person”, explains Carlos Barragán.
Going where no one has gone: into the Yahoo Boys’ lair. This is how this type of cyber-fraudsters that abound in Nigeria is known. “These are people who live by scamming others online. Not only with love scams. There are plenty of systems. And I wanted to know how they worked from the inside.” Yahoo’s name comes from the technology company that has an instant messaging application used by these scammers to hunt down the unsuspecting.
“I knew a journalist from the New York Times who recommended a reliable fixer (person who hires a reporter to act as a guide in the most conflictive destinations). In that sense, I left calm. Then, in November 2021, I decided to tell my mother. That I was going to go after that story. Not out of spite or revenge, but out of pure journalistic curiosity. I was already so convinced that I thought “I hope my mother likes it”. I explained it to him and luckily for me it seemed fine to him”, recalls the journalist, while a Nigerian knocks on the door of his room to remind him that he has an interview in a few minutes.
in the lion’s den
Carlos arrived in Nigeria in 2022, having invested almost all of his savings in the project. He had already visited Nigeria three years before, but as a tourist. This time he came to get into the lion’s den. He arrived at the Lagos airport at midnight and there, among clandestine and local taxi drivers who were fighting to transport him, was bukky omoseni, the fixer that had been recommended. He was accompanied by Biggy, a friend who worked as a cyber scammer. A Yahoo Boy who was going to tell him about his experiences.
By chance, Bukky, the official fixer, fell ill with malaria and typhoid fever a few days later. He ended up admitted to the hospital. And Biggy, the Yahoo Boy who came only to testify, ended up taking his place. “The fact that he was a kid my age made us very close. I don’t know if I should tell you that we became friends, but for me it was. He slept in my apartment, we ate together, we drank together, we smoked joints together, we played games the play, he took me to a party to Afrobeat discos or to play billiards…”.
That relationship made Biggy end up introducing him to more Yahoo Boys. They taught her his work methods, they showed her the conversations with his victims: “I lived for 11 days with them and humanized them. I saw them perform and fleece people, but I also saw them worrying about me and telling me about their lives. Biggy spent the day smoking joints and told me “I have to cheat”, as an obligation, like someone who doesn’t want to go to work,” says Carlos.
“The good thing about my fixer getting sick was that Biggy let me see his cell phone and showed me the conversations with his customers, which is what they call their victims. That is completely inaccessible and has great value for my story,” he says, recalling that the Yahoo Boys are “people who come from an environment of great poverty and very few opportunities; that’s why they dedicate themselves to this.”
“Biggy, for example, was scamming a woman in the United States whose daughter died in an accident. They are usually people who come from emotional trauma, people who have been left alone. Once, Biggy was next to me playing Fifa from the Playstation. I read one of the conversations from months ago and she told him “I want to commit suicide”. I remember that at that moment I asked myself “Who am I with?”
No news from Brian
“There are some who work for free and others who belong to a kind of company; who work for other people. I know that the one who tried to deceive my mother was one of the latter because with that bullion scam He intended to get about 5,000 euros. Those who work for themselves are often kids who are content with get 100 or 200 euros“, illustrates Carlos.
The journalist never found Brian. They already told him when he arrived that he was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. The number of people who are engaged in scams online in Nigeria is incalculable. These types of scams are known as 419, which is the article number of the Nigerian Penal Code that sanctions these practices. But they are almost undetectable.
Carlos is currently working on the book and has once again traveled to Lagos (where he is at the time of publication of this report) to complete the information. “Living with them has made me humanize them, but I also realized that they spoke with tremendous coldness about the people they scammed. If you have to earn money, you can’t think that your customers They have feelings.”