Overview

A New York Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of 2026 ""I have found few books lately as immediately compelling as Barragán's, and as a reader, I could not put it down . . . The Yahoo Boys is a tour-de-force."" --Jon Lee Anderson ""An eye-popping window onto the strange new connections blossoming in our fully globalized, too-online world . . . It only gets wilder from there."" --Publishers Weekly Summer Reads 2026 ""An enviable feat of reportage and writing--as intrepid as it is sympathetic."" --Gideon Lewis-Kraus 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 find his mother's scammer, where he stumbled on a much bigger story. There, in a crowded and impoverished neighborhood in the midst of Africa's largest city, he encountered 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 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, this book reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how loneliness in the West and poverty in Nigeria are two sides of the same screen.

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9780374609306

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Reviews

""Carlos Barragán traveled to Lagos, Nigeria in search of the con artist who had romanced his divorced mother and found himself submerged in the sleepless, hard-partying world of the Yahoo Boys--a subculture fueled by music, booze, and drugs, as well as poverty and ambition and even love. Barragán writes with impeccable empathy about both the scammers and their lonely heart victims to produce a compellingly readable exploration of the psychology of the romance scam."" --Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

""In The Yahoo Boys, Carlos Barragán takes us on a remarkable journey into the world of Nigerian scammers. Written with an astonishing degree of immersive detail, we get to know a group of young Nigerians who adopt false identities online for the purpose of wooing lonely, real-life Americans in order to extract money from them. I have found few books lately as immediately compelling as Barragán's, and as a reader, I could not put it down. As an unexpected fresh take on the bewilderingly quicksilver world we live in, The Yahoo Boys is a tour-de-force."" --Jon Lee Anderson, author of To Lose a War and Che: A Revolutionary Life ""If The Yahoo Boys were merely a picaresque tour of the world of Nigerian scammers, it would have been worth it for the entertainment value alone. In Carlos Barragán's hands, however, this is a technically sophisticated, emotionally acute, and sociologically wise exploration of a shadow economy driven by devices, loneliness, and global inequality. It's an enviable feat of reportage and writing--as intrepid as it is sympathetic."" --Gideon Lewis-Kraus, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of A Sense of Direction ""The Yahoo Boys is a fascinating and important exploration, one that is full of warmth and empathy. Carlos Barragán has constructed something that is both intimately personal and globally relevant."" --Dipo Faloyin, author of Africa Is Not a Country ""Carlos Barragán traveled to Lagos, Nigeria in search of the con artist who had romanced his divorced mother and found himself submerged in the sleepless, hard-partying world of the Yahoo Boys--a subculture fueled by music, booze, and drugs, as well as poverty and ambition and even love. Barragán writes with impeccable empathy about both the scammers and their lonely heart victims to produce a compellingly readable exploration of the psychology of the romance scam."" --Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Daughters of the Bamboo Grove ""Carlos Barragán has nailed it, capturing the mystery of internet romance scamming. He is a remarkable ethnographer, filled with empathy for both victimizers and victims: impoverished Nigerian adolescents full of dreams, and his own mother, who yearns for love and companionship. Most importantly, we learn that both sides of this tragic global equation suffer deeply. I wish all anthropologists could write as grippingly, empathetically and clearly as does Barragán."" --Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect

Author Information

Carlos Barragán is a reporter and researcher for The New York Times based in Madrid. He was formerly a reporter at El Confidencial before receiving his MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. The Yahoo Boys is his first book.

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