Yahoo Boys

When his mother fell for an 'American soldier' who promised to send gold bars to their Madrid apartment, Carlos Barrag n found himself with an unexpected window into the shadowy world of online romance fraud. He set off on a journey to find his mother's scammer, but what he discovered was much bigger: a world of young Nigerian men who drag themselves out of destitution by catfishing lonely hearts in the US and Europe, in the process building a dizzying local economy from their phones.The Yahoo Boys follows four scammers in Ikotun - one of Lagos's poorest neighbourhoods, a scant ten miles from the gleaming heart of the megacity. Through their twisting fortunes, Barrag n discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the economic desperation that drives them, and the moral dilemmas they face. A work of radical empathy, this astonishing narrative nonfiction debut reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how isolation in the West and poverty in Nigeria are just two sides of the same screen.