'The Yahoo Boys' investigates Nigeria’s network of cyber crime 'sweetheart scams'

In 2022, journalist Carlos Barragán moved to Lagos, Nigeria to investigate a cybercrime network of text-based internet phishing, also known as “sweetheart scams." He found that a small band of young men known as the “Yahoo Boys” were creating fake avatars to lure American victims into online romances — a 21st-century iteration of the Yahoo email scams from the 1990s. Barragán, who wrote about his…