The Yahoo Boys:
Anatomy of an online subculture

If you have spent any time on the internet at all, you have probably encountered some variation of the Nigerian Prince scam. Usually it takes the form of an unsolicited email promising riches in exchange for a small advanced payment. While the name comes from an old scam in which a “Nigerian Prince” will approach the mark with an offer to invest in his country, there are many variations. One iteration I have come across alleges to be from Ghaddafi’s daughter, asking for a small loan to help her smuggle precious artwork and jewelry out of the country.

Paid-per-click

Internet was first made publicly accessible to Nigeria until 1991, with the establishment of the National Center for Communication Technologies, Nigeria’s first Internet Service Provider. It did not take long for the first cybercafes to appear in Lagos, and by the mid 90s these were a booming homegrown industry.

Anybody who spent time in the developing world during the late 90s and early 2000s will know what lively places these cybercafes could be. Often people’s only source of connection to the internet, they were community hubs, live in offices, and multi-media centers all rolled into a cramped storefront lined with box monitors and stacks of system unites.

In 1991, Nigeria had already suffered from over a decade of economic stagnation and decline. The Oil Glut of the 1980s had done much damage to their economy, and without sufficient diversification they were faced with a staggering 40% unemployment rate among youth by the mid 80s.[4] Austerity measures and structural reforms and imposed by the IMF did little to alleviate the situation. Successive generations of Nigerian youth found themselves graduating from secondary school with an education but no hope of economic advancement, and it was into this context that the first cybercafes were born.

One of the first “scams” to take root in Nigeria’s cybercafe were pay-per-click fraud, in which advertisers would pay Nigerians to click on adds. Being paid in part based on how engagement, these advertisers would pay people as little as $0.0001 per click to create the false appearance of engagement.[5] Little as it was, it was better than nothing. Hundreds or even thousands of adds could be clicked on, the earnings deposited into a Liberty Reserve account, and then withdrawn in bulk or moved to a Nigerian bank. It provided flexibility, freedom, and the prospect of self employment. It also represented that first tiny step into the global economy, a sign of things to come.

The name “Yahoo boy” comes from the popular email service Yahoo. Unlike many of it’s competitors, Yahoo allowed users to anonymously register an email address from anywhere in the world. Armed with an email, these ‘Yahoo Boys’ could then register for online money services and start earning in dollars. It didn’t take them long to graduate from PTC fraud to more sophisticated scams. One especially popular fraud, the advanced fee scam, is now known globally as the “Nigerian Prince” scam because of this, and less commonly as “419” on account of the section of Nigeria’s criminal code which deals with such frauds. The potential for high rewards from an unsuspecting mark made this the fraud of choice for many Nigerian scammers, and by 2001 advanced fee scams made up a whopping 15% of all online fraud.

From it’s humble beginnings in crowded internet cafes, where unemployed young men would spend hours clicking adds for a fraction of penny, “Yahoo Yahoo” (slang for cybercrime in Nigerian Pidgin) has become a booming global industry, bring hundreds of millions of dollars into the country annually.[6]

The Yahoo Boys

One of the most audacious scams in history started with the simple dream of building a new airport in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city since 1991. When Nelson Sakaguchi, head of the Brazilian bank Banco Noroeste was contacted by fax in March 1995 with a proposal to invest in the venture, he didn’t question it. The capital of Nigeria had been Lagos, it’s most populated city, until four years ago, and with the changing of administrative center to Abuja it made sense that the city would require an international transit hub. He responded with interest, and soon found himself invited to London to discuss the venture in greater detail. There he met with Paul Agbai Ogwuma, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and paid an initial investment of $35,000 with the expectation of some $40 million being transferred to the bank at a later date.

Unfortunately for Sakaguchi, he did not actually meet with Paul Agbai Ogwuma. He in fact met Emmanuel Nwude, a Nigerian businessman and former director of the Union Bank of Nigeria. The joint business transaction was a fraud, the airport fake, and the money funneled directly into Nwude’s bank account

Over a period of several years Nwude managed to convince Sakaguchi to invest a staggering $190 million dollars before Sakaguchi’s eventual dismissal from Banco Noroeste.[7] Although this was a fairly straightforward advanced payment scam, in which a fraudster offers a large sum of money to be made/paid out in return for a relatively small initial investment, it was unique in the level of effort that went into it- including multiple in person business meetings as well as the degree of technical expertise that Nwude was afforded as a former bank director.

Initially Sakaguchi, after realizing her had been scammed, tried to bury his mistake. It was not until 1998, when Banco Santander was attempting to buy Banco Noroeste and reviewing it’s internal financials, that the extent of the fraud was realized.

Emmanuel Nwude was eventually caught and prosecuted, as well as forced to pay back much of the money that he had defrauded. He has since used his notoriety (and, allegedly, hundreds of millions of dollars hidden in offshore accounts) to pivot into politics, and was recently accused of being involved in an armed raid on the town of Ukpo that saw four policemen shot.[8] He has since been released on bail and is currently president-general of the Ugbene Town Union.[9]

Ramon Olorunwa Abbas: defrauded a US law firm of US$40 million through BEC fraud

Also known as Hushpuppi, Ramon Olorunwa Abbas has been the most glamorous Yahoo boy to come out of the scene. His Instagram features pictures of him driving luxury sports cars, flashing designer watches, partying with famous celebrities and staying in luxurious hotel suites. At the height of his career he was involved in laundering over $14 million dollars with a co-conspirator, owned both a Rolls Royce Wraith and Rolls Royce Cullinan, and had multiple properties throughout Nigeria and Malaysia.[10]

The son of a Lagos taxi driver, Abbas was not born into wealth. In his ‘Letter to a Ghetto Kid’ Abbas describes the pain of poverty, how him and his family were chased out of a rented room by a landlord, how as a young man he had to sell used clothing to survive. “Nobody is listening to your cries; your lamentation; and your grievances are not felt a bit. If I had sat down complaining about the bad government; bad economy; bad friends, I will not be here today.”[11]

Abbas’s fraud of choice was the Business Email Compromise (BEC) scam.[12] In it, malware or fake emails will be used to trick companies into sending money to fraudulent accounts. These scams are often quite sophisticated, requiring detailed knowledge of the internal company structure. For Yahoo Boys, such information can often be found on the company website, if not internal documents. In one instance Abbas was able to fraudulently obtain a whopping $922,857.76 from in a single attack.[13]

“Dear hustling hood kid, let no man hold you down. My advice for you is never to put your dreams in the hands of Ambode and Buhari, they don’t know you, they don’t believe in you cos there’s millions of people like you on their neck, it’s not much they can do if they can even do anything at all so don’t expect you will ever win or make it by waiting for anyone.” is how Abbas ends his ‘Letter to a Ghetto Kid.’

Oluwaseun Medayedupin: recently caught sending out ransomware solicitations

A more recent example of a new kind of ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ is the case of Oluwaseun Medayedupin, a young Nigeria entrepreneur who is alleged to have sent out a number of solicitous emails asking disgruntled employees to install the program DemonWare, an unsophisticated ransomware virus which is obtainable on github,[14] on their employers networks. In this scheme Medayedupin promises to split the profits, to be paid out in crypto with an expected $2.5 million ransom, forty-sixty with his collaborators.[15]

This scheme was quickly reported to authorities, but it is an example of a new and powerful form of attack. Anybody with access to critical computer infrastructure can install ransomware with relative ease, and once released the results can be devastating and completely cripple a corporation.

While last case does not have the large dollar amounts attached to it as the first couple cases, in fact, I have not been able to find any evidence that this scheme was successful at all, a number of State and non-state actors have employed ransomware attacks as a form of economic warfare with incredible success.

Yahoo Yahoo

What are the tools of a Yahoo boy? They are surprisingly unsophisticated: a laptop, e-sims, and TOR for encryption is usually sufficient to get started. Bank accounts are often fraudulently obtained through the use of fake or stolen IDs. The Yahoo boy’s best weapon is his mind, and the best of them are comparable to successful method actors, completely embodying the role they need to play.

A friend of mine, who had known some Yahoo boys in his youth, explained the mentality to me. Nigeria, the whole of Africa really, was looted and robbed during colonialism; so when they go abroad, they want to steal back as much wealth as they can. Put in those terms I have to sympathize with them. While the typical Yahoo Boy might be a heart-breaker (romance scams account for hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent gains[16]), he is not a violent man. There is no chopping off of hands, as with the criminal International African Association formed in Brussels. Nor is there the imposed homelessness and destitution favored by our modern day robber barons, the rent-seeking international capital behind companies like Blackstone and Brookfield. Yahoo Boys practice guerrilla tactics, watching and waiting for the opportune moment, then striking at critical vulnerabilities and quickly retreating, loot in hand, behind the cover of anonymization technology.

The emergence of these digital raids has been compared by some commentators to a modern iteration of tribal warfare (western ‘intellectuals’ love to reduce everything African to war and tribes), but I prefer to think of it as politics by other means. Cyberwarfare is undoubtedly becoming an increasingly useful weapon for State-affiliated groups, organizations such as MUN 74455 which crippled Ukranian infrastructure and cost tens of billions of dollars in damages during the 2017 NotPetya attacks[17] and APT38 has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars for the North Korean government.[18] The release of the Chinese LLM model DeepSeek, while not being cyberwarfare in the conventional sense, was even more devastating, wiping out over a trillion dollars in stock value from American companies.[19]

As the technologies of war and finance become more specialized, the massive land armies of the last century are increasingly rendered superfluous by small groups of technicians augmented with cutting edge technologies capable of delivering incredible financial damage, comparable to the brigantines of old. If the last century was a century of mass movements and grand ideologies, it seems to me that our own might more resemble the Golden Age of Piracy..

Criminal Culture

Several years ago the Ex Secretary of State Colin Powell caused a minor scandal when, during an Olamide concert, he got on stage and started dancing along to the song ‘Yahooze’, about the Yahoo boy subculture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sHC64IEC2Y

Although the artist, Olumide Edwards Adegbulu, intended the song to be a ‘social commentary’ on how Nigeria sometimes glamorizes cybercrime, it has been interpreted by some critics as a glorification of the practice.[20]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MW7kcZnaiA

There is a lot of ‘social commentary’ of this nature, where successful artists will create songs critical of Yahoo boy culture, which is then misinterpreted by authorities as a confession. In one case the Nigerian singer Naira Marley was arrested by police after his song “Am I a Yahoo Boy” which jokingly made light of a rumour that he was in fact an internet fraudster.[21]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvBZk4a871I

These accusations are, of course, ridiculous. There is a lot of money to be made in the arts, as is evident by the often ironically used phrase “starving artist”. But the insinuations persist, which has led to a whole movement of Nigerian artists jokingly identifying as Yahoo boys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP7w94x3jOk

Independently wealthy from his career as a musician, Olamide has since founded his own record label, which promotes Nigerian culture and helps to launch young artists in the country “I just started stacking up money, and the money was becoming too much for me. I’m like, yo, I don’t have anything to do with all this money, mehn, I need to sign new guys. Let me spend money on people, you know.” Olamide stated in one interview.[22]

Habere non haberi

The point of this article is not to glamorize these Yahoo Boys, who, armed with nothing but a laptop were able to pull off some of the biggest heists in history. I just want to shed light on an interesting subculture. Instead, we should take inspiration from the generation of Nigerian singers and musicians who rose out of the same milieu, and, through honest hard work, were able to bring money into their communities, invest in younger generations, and help Nigeria rise in the world. Today Nigeria can boast the richest and fasted growing economy in Africa, and they did it all without the help of the Yahoo boys.