In 2022, journalist Carlos Barragán moved to Lagos, Nigeria to investigate a cybercrime network of text-based internet phishing, also known as “sweetheart scams." He found that a small band of young men known as the “Yahoo Boys” were creating fake avatars to lure American victims into online romances — a 21st-century iteration of the Yahoo email scams from the 1990s. Barragán, who wrote about his discoveries in
The Yahoo Boys, joined NPR’s Eyder Peralta to discuss the new book, and why these cybercriminals are not actually “masterminds of the universe playing with your minds.”
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