Finding Nigeria's romance scammers

Guardian Nigeria

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00:00 My name is Carlos Barragán and I decided that I wanted to come to Nigeria to know more

00:04 about the Yaw boys and to know why they do it.

00:08 In 2015, in December, my mother met a guy.

00:17 My mother quickly fell in love with this guy.

00:20 She met him through Tinder and then through emails.

00:23 When my mother was going to send him money, we discovered that he was being scammed.

00:29 And instead of talking to an American soldier in Syria, I discovered that this guy was in

00:34 Lagos, Nigeria.

00:36 But luckily enough, my mother understood very quickly when I saw her that the emails weren't

00:43 coming from Syria, but Lagos.

00:46 My mother was devastated because my mother has always been a single mother, or most of

00:52 her life.

00:53 She said something, she said just one thing, "How fool I am."

00:57 The funny thing is that it was me, it was me who told my mother, "Go into Tinder to

01:02 find other people."

01:04 But during the pandemic, five years later, my mother was living alone and I kept thinking

01:08 about who this guy was.

01:11 The good thing is that everybody from my brothers and my mother were eager about this story.

01:17 They wanted me to tell this story.

01:19 And talking to other Nigerians, I felt their pain when they go abroad.

01:27 And the first thing someone tells them is, "Are you a scammer?"

01:34 Which is something that is racist.

01:36 I decided that I wanted to come to Nigeria to know more about the Yahoo Boys and to know

01:41 why they do it.

01:43 So I ended up living with this guy, Biggie, a Yahoo Boy.

01:48 He told me that police officers were part of the problem because some of them were accepting

01:54 bribes.

01:55 I gathered from them that it's something that police officers can't do anything about it,

02:02 or at least they don't have the resources to fight this epidemic, as one of the police

02:10 officers I interviewed called it.

02:12 Yahoo is rampant and it's happening in all sorts of classes, social classes.

02:21 One of the Yahoo Boys kept telling me about one of his clients.

02:26 And she told him that she was thinking about killing herself, an American woman.

02:32 And he kept saying, "No, no, no.

02:34 She's not going to kill herself.

02:37 She just wants attention."

02:39 So I understand why they do that, because if you want to scam, Roman scam, which is

02:45 my specialization, if you want to do a scam like that, you can't think about the other

02:49 person's feelings.

02:50 Because something that Americans and Europeans don't understand, they don't have a clear

02:54 picture of who these guys are.

02:57 When you understand, the way you look at them is different from when you just think that

03:02 they are evil, they are callous, they are all looking for money, which is sometimes

03:10 true, sometimes it's not.

03:12 And the money is one thing, but what they go through is something they are not going

03:18 to forget.

03:21 So it's not excusable, because the pain that you are causing in the other side of the world

03:26 is enormous.

03:28 The problem with victims of these kind of Roman scams is that it's very difficult for

03:32 them to understand that they are talking to someone else, to someone different, that the

03:37 person they have in their mind doesn't exist.

03:40 Victims have described the pain as, like, it's the saddest crime on earth, because I've

03:47 seen scammers getting money as soon as, like, three hours after starting talking to someone,

03:53 which reveals to you a lot about the loneliness that that person is going through.

03:58 So yeah, I would say that, and also I think it's important to tell the families of the

04:03 victims, you have something, like, you have some responsibility, you know?

04:10 You have to be more with them, because if you don't help them, it's like young people

04:15 here in Nigeria, if you don't help them, then maybe other things happen.

04:21 And this with the victims is the same.

04:24 I think that it's important to tell victims, there is no something like fast love.

04:29 Don't send money to someone you've never met.

04:32 I would say going to online dating, but also you have to learn the red flags.

04:37 I want to tell America, and tell Europe, the problem is here, but also the problem is in

04:43 the other side.

04:44 It's not only a Nigerian problem, and of course there are scammers everywhere, but the problem

04:49 we have in Europe and in the US is that we are not doing enough for the lonely people.

04:56 I'm here in Nigeria back again, because we are reporting on other stories.

05:01 We are meeting more Yahoo boys.

05:03 At the same time, I'm interviewing Roman scam victims in the US, people even who have come

05:10 all the way from America to here because they were duped.

05:14 This is what happened, she stopped dating for a while, but I remember she dated another

05:22 man.

05:23 She keeps trying, she keeps trying, she keeps telling me, "Oh, men from my generation are

05:30 not as good as the last one.

05:33 Where are they?

05:34 I can't find them."

05:35 But she is persistent, and I'm sure that she's going to find someone.

05:40 I'm open to other stories, either in Nigeria, Europe, or in the US.

05:45 We will see.

05:47 The only thing I hope is that not more stories about my mother.

05:51 I want to keep the relationship modest, and I don't want to write more about her, although

05:56 we have a pretty good relationship.

05:58 I think that I've done the job, and now I'm ready to go to the next project.

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