The Yahoo Boys

About this book

A New York Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of 2026Named a Best Book of the Year So Far by The New Yorker and VultureA People Best Book of June A USA Today Most Anticipated Summer ReadShortlisted for the Air Mail Tom Wolfe Literary Prize "A nonfiction book which really knocked me out . . . It's incredible . . . An extraordinary piece of reporting." --Patrick Radden Keefe, The Long Game podcast "What [Barragán has] produced feels miraculous: journalism that is simultaneously funny, devastating, wildly intimate, and righteous without veering into moralism." --Kate Knibbs, Wired (Book Club Pick)An astonishing work of immersion journalism about four young romance scammers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring how and why they scam, and the moral dilemmas they face. When his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragán came face-to-face with the human toll of online romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he set off on a journey to Lagos to try to find his mother's scammer. There, he uncovered a much bigger story: in the midst of Africa's largest city, he encountered a community of thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves "Yahoo Boys," and each year they catfish millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones. In this astonishing work of immersion journalism, Barragán takes us inside the lives of four of the Yahoo Boys of Lagos. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor's apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria's economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he's responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky whom he manipulated online for years. Some Yahoo Boys attain the status of folk heroes, buying houses and cars with the money they make, while others become dependent on drugs and "cash out"--successfully scam a victim--only to lose it all. Through the Yahoo Boys' twisting fortunes, Barragán discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the brutal economic realities that drive them, and the moral dilemmas they confront. A work of radical empathy, The Yahoo Boys reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, showing how loneliness in the West and poverty in Nigeria are two sides of the same screen.