First published 2026
Carlos Barragán's mother was exchanging emails with a handsome American soldier who promised to deliver gold bars to her Madrid apartment. When Barragán traced those emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he flew to Lagos to find the man behind them. He found something much larger instead. In a dense, impoverished neighborhood inside Africa's biggest city, thousands of young men run romance scams from their phones, calling themselves Yahoo Boys. They steal millions of dollars each year from lonely people abroad and build entire local economies from the proceeds. Barragán spent time with four of them. Biggy and Chibuike wrestle with the pull of fast money. Azeez is a tailor's apprentice weighing crime against Nigeria's economic collapse. Richie believes he caused the death of a woman in Kentucky who sent him money for years. Some Yahoo Boys buy houses and cars and become neighborhood folk heroes. Others spiral into drug dependence and lose everything they scammed. Barragán maps the psychological methods they use, the poverty that pushes them toward fraud, and the moral weight they carry. The book argues that Western loneliness and Nigerian poverty are not separate problems but two faces of the same one.
Genres: biography, sociology, non-fiction, journalism, true-crime, current-affairs
Vibes: eye-opening, gritty, immersive, intimate, morally-complex, thought-provoking
Tropes: interconnected-narratives, moral-ambiguity, personal-testimony, systemic-analysis
Setting: Lagos, Nigeria, Madrid, Kentucky, Africa
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
304 pages · Paperback · Picador
Content warnings: addiction, death, substance-abuse