GoKawiilFor the first edition of WIRED Book Club, we've chosen Carlos Barragán’s The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers. Barragán took an old-school shoe-leather approach to a very online subject, flying to Lagos to embed himself with a group of young, desperate grifters. The account he brings back is a funny, sad, enraging read about how the internet can fuel heartbreak. Below is a preview of one of our favorite passages.
Chibuike spent most nights dancing. He loved Afrobeats, breakdancing, and hip-hop, always impressing everyone with his backflips. Initially, he danced just for fun, but soon night club managers in Ikotun began paying him and his friends. It wasn’t much, just enough to survive until the next party. The real generosity came from the clientele, young men who spent money freely, almost recklessly. Some of them did “dorime”—Nigerian slang for lavish spending, particularly ordering bottles of alcohol and having them delivered with sparklers, all to the tune of the song “Ameno,” whose main lyrical hook is the fake Latin word dorime. Chibuike also witnessed some of them doing dorime with bottles of water: They would pay 50 times its value just to show off.
Chibuike had always known about Yahoo Boys. In a place like Ikotun, you had to be blind not to see them. But it was during those nights spent dancing that he decided to become one.
He first asked a friend for help. The friend taught him the basics but left the neighborhood after a couple of months. To keep learning, Chibuike listened carefully to the guys on the street talking about terms like “formats,” “billings,” and “up dates,” and what to do when the client asked for a video call. Meanwhile, Chibuike tried all sorts of “jobs”: man to woman, woman to man, hookup, buying and selling fake goods on Facebook Marketplace … without success. He sometimes got $10, but he normally failed. No matter what he did, white clients stopped replying to his messages at some point. God, should I leave this hustle? Chibuike thought. For two years, he made barely any money.
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“I was always getting promises,” Chibuike remembered years later. “Clients would say, ‘I will send you the money today.’ But I got nothing.”
Instead of quitting, Chibuike changed his strategy: He began impersonating the world champion wrestler Cody Rhodes. “Celeb” scams were becoming increasingly popular. In Lagos, you could bump into young guys who pretended to be Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or Johnny Depp online. Chibuike chose Cody Rhodes because he knew all about the wrestler’s background. His stepdad was a big fan of WWE—he always rooted for John Cena—and watched the fights with Chibuike on an LG plasma TV. The matches were one of the few times they didn’t argue, and Chibuike got used to watching the fights live on YouTube. It was important for him to know when Rhodes was in the ring, so his victims wouldn’t find out that they weren’t speaking to the real wrestler.
Choosing to impersonate Cody Rhodes turned out to be a smart move for Chibuike’s scamming career. Little did Chibuike know, though, how drastically his life was about to change.
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