In the dark side of Yahoo boys underworld

Yahoo boys is a popular term used in Nigeria to describe young men between late teenage and as old as 50 fifty years and more, who scam women, usually of the same age range and foreign nationality, of money and gifts with the help of cybernetic devices. In Ghana they are known by the Hausa name “Sakawa boys”. As the name suggests it gained currency as the internet spread across major cities in Nigeria like Lagos and university towns, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Currently we could say it has approached pandemic levels penetrating suburbs and rural villages as law enforcement officials continue to displace many practitioners and in many cases allow it to fester when settlements and protection money are made to rogue officials. These young men or yahoo boys despite employing the latest cybernetic gadgets for their trade, on the other hand employ the most rudimentary communication objects: juju. In this write-up we will try to piece together aspects of this social problem ranging from the psychopathic to the fetish and information technology advances.

In 2020, Yahoo mail had over 200 million active users, Google’s version, or Gmail, at about the same time had 1.5 billion users. Between 1997 and 2004 when Yahoo mail and Gmail were formed respectively, providing very cheap means of, and fast, transmission of electronic mails, saw the terms yahoo boys and G-guys come into relatively wider usage in Nigeria non-mainstream media space. This period corresponds with the Dot-com boom, tech bubble or internet bubble across the U.S. and the world generally. During this time cyber cafes were becoming ubiquitous across cities in Nigeria, telecom masts donned the skyline marking the location of these business centers; offering desktop computers on library-like settings and selling internet browsing airtime to customers. Many patrons used these services to scout for job and travel opportunities to developed countries, but many used them to perpetuate scams by sending bogus emails to “clients” and coming back later to browse for any replies. Many cyber cafes made more profits by opening at night for customers. By 2007 yahoo boys and internet scam had gotten far in the youth subculture that a smash music hit titled Yahoozee by superstar Olu Maintain ruled the charts and airwaves for months.

Internet scam has gone far since the Dot-com boom. The money coming to the perpetrators has grown as the criminal syndication has grown too, technology is advancing with the help of artificial intelligence, including Deepfakes, further keeping scammers steps ahead of law enforcement and even the media. Syndicates scattered across Nigeria are usually refered to as H.K, a reference to, and initials for hacker. These mostly living apartments-based syndicates recruit potential yahoo boys in a type of apprenticeship setting providing only accommodation but no feeding or other basic necessities. Such recruits face all kinds of hardships, violence and abuse from their bosses. In 2016 Forbes Magazine had named Obinwanne Okeke as one of its 30 Top African Enterpreneurs with investments in real estate and agriculture; by September 2019 alongside another 80 people he faced U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation indictment, in what has been described as the largest case of online fraud in America. In 2022 it was also reported that the U.S. government has lost over $100 billion to fraud on its pandemic relief fund in the aftermath of COVID-19 and Americans have lost another sizeable $30 billion to scams by 2021.

Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, the EFCC reported the arrest of a syndicate boss and his 21 apprentices. The boss is said to be the owner of the De Rock Club in September, 2022; a month later 16 yahoo boys were deported from Ghana. In November of same year Nigeria’s most popular yahoo boy, or social media influencer, was jailed for 11 years in a U.S. court for international fraud syndication. By the end of that year the American FBI warned about the rise of “sextortion” involving scammers extorting money from teenagers and young boys, who were tricked into sending explicit pictures of themselves. Prior to these 2022 events yahoo boys had a Robin Hood mystic in Nigeria, seen as stealing excess wealth from white rich girls, in some cases rich white men, and bringing the monies home to help poor youths. The mystic is still there no doubt, however the increasing Western enforcement activities in collaboration with Nigerian officials is tightening the noose; but at the same time this is creating or bringing the problem back home. Many yahoo boys are increasingly targeting Nigerians themselves especially retirees from government service or, in collusion with bank workers, targeting customers’ bank accounts.

Increasing law enforcement operations are shedding more light on the dark side of this underworld. When police raid their hideouts strange objects of a religious nature are seized alongside Apple, HP and Sony laptops and phones: charms, amulets, figurines, empty animal shells, and unknown powders are common fetishes recovered used as juju objects. Other important fetishes include female underwears, high heeled shoes, bra are also recovered. Then many yahoo boys tend to appropriate female outlook by skin toning and bleaching, earrings, black nail polishing, hair colouring and braiding; clothing tend to be beach shorts or ripped jeans and velvet combinations with outsized Tshirts or designers casual shirts, luxury cars like Lexus, Mercedes and small motorcycles are seen as trendy. However dressing like this is not an identifying marker, but they tend to favour this kind of wardrobe.

Effeminate masculinity can well be used to describe some of the above traits on their wardrobe tastes; many of them know their female clients, or victims, like them this way; but where does the juju aspect come in? The juju objects and practices have nothing to do with the client, at least not objectively verifiable, it has everything to do with the mental state of the subject, or yahoo boy. Most of the subjects are showing signs of paraphilia, people with this psychopathy are usually sexually aroused by atypical objects, fantasies, situations, behaviours, and individuals, because they have difficulty in reciprocating love or consent in a relationship. Therefore fetishes or juju objects are the medium to attain these desires; also cybernetics is the primary medium of communicating to the client, who has the gratification sought, money. Juju objects creates in the mind of the user or purchaser a level of control over their clients whenever their wishes or intension is delivered through cybernetic devices such as iphones, android phones and laptop computers. These devices can be manipulated by the yahoo boy to warp reality that this warping becomes truth and fact. The object is not sex or a true relationship from the client, the object is to make the client aroused like the subject and to release money so that the relationship can continue. So cybernetic devices are physically employed as a real world medium to communicate information for online love affairs, but on the one end of the network juju is believed to do the actual trick.

Juju paraphilia and the objective mediation of cybernetic devices in the Nigerian youth subculture has landed segments of young people in what can be called a posthuman situation. These yahooboys are essentially intertwined in a state where their very existence is a simulation, including of their victims, or clients. Nancy Katherine Hayles writing in her 1999 book “How We Became Posthuman” believed that the mind is key and the human body itself is a mere appendage of the mind.

She also questioned notions on our differing socio-cultural milieu which sees information and the material it stems from as two very separate entities. Nigerian youths as the old cliché goes are the leaders of tomorrow, for me they have every right to have expectations from society and from government. In trying to bring to fruition expectations they frequently break the law and seek counsel from the underground. The underground is undergird by juju priests and priestesses, including self-styled prophets in makeshift Christian temples, sometimes located in lavishly furnished detached duplexes reeking of wealth on display for would-be celebrated socialites.

The phenomenon of yahoo boys, sometimes formerly called cybercriminals, stems from systemic failures on multiple fronts; a bulging youthful population resulting from lack of proper family planning and then a lack of proper governmental intervensionist programme to mitigate growing up stages in terms of education and national integration has left a cancer to sprout aggressively. The Western Liberal education format is the way adopted by many states in Africa and more especially in Nigeria, the tools taught at schools to children are just seen as what they are: as tools. Parents teach children at home to see these tools as belonging to a toolbox, needed only when kids are grown up and in search of jobs. Belief in the supernatural is used to override formal education, belief in the fetish power of juju objects with its attendant superstition and appeal to neuroses or phobias cannot be underestimated; in formal literature the Muslim/Christian divide is normally represented as 50/50 of the population, but at a latent underlying current the truth is and the facts on the ground show that belief in juju can be safely put at 99% of the entire population, or even more. Note that many clergy of both official religions have been reported to seek the power of juju. Therefore it’s not a surprise when youths with suspected psychopathic issues instrumentalise juju as the main course while cybernetic gadgets such as mobile devices and laptops are the corollary. Brainpower in Nigeria is failing on all fronts because of our social and political systems, and this is why we should at least learn from another information specialist, Norbert Wiener, he says that the human brain must function as a computing machine, if not, mental health issues are a logical progression from that. I believe we may be half a generation, or more, away from achieving this, but it will not hurt us to start now.

Ufondu is Political and Social Analyst in Lagos, he can be reached via [email protected]