The Yahoo Boys

[Barragán] discovered a whole new world, one in which the internet promises a route out of chronic poverty, and where answers to the West’s ongoing loneliness epidemic are - however temporarily - being offered by people almost as desperate … Affecting … It would be easy to dismiss the Yahoo boys as nothing more than heartless manipulators, yet I found some of my sympathies - to my surprise - lying with them * TELEGRAPH *
Engrossing … Takes readers from Kentucky to Lagos … Barragán wonders how credulous Westerners can fall head-over-heels for such smarmy scripts. But he finds something alarmingly simple: the scammers are successful because they provide attention to lonely people * ECONOMIST *
More than crime reportage … Barragán’s achievement is to make this world intelligible without making excuses for it. He has a reporter’s gift for proximity. He lets the scammers talk-at length, often hilariously-but not hide inside their own mythology. When the Yahoo Boys try to justify their behavior by invoking reparations for slavery or revenge for white colonialism, the author keeps pressing until the rhetoric gives way to something smaller and uglier: appetite, vanity, boredom and the pleasure of getting away with it * WALL STREET JOURNAL *
I have found few books lately as immediately compelling as Barragán’s … As an unexpected, fresh take on the bewilderingly quicksilver world we live in, The Yahoo Boys is a tour-de-force – JON LEE ANDERSON, author of To Lose a War and Che Guevara
This is nonfiction that reads like a compelling novel … Unexpectedly tender … What [Barragán has] produced feels miraculous: journalism that is simultaneously funny, devastating, wildly intimate, and righteous without veering into moralism * WIRED *
Carlos Barragán traveled to Lagos, Nigeria in search of the con artist who had romanced his divorced mother. He found himself submerged in the sleepless, hard-partying world of the Yahoo Boys - a subculture fueled by music, booze and drugs, as well as poverty and ambition and even love. Barragán writes with impeccable empathy about both the scammers and their lonelyheart victims … A compellingly readable exploration of the psychology of the romance scam – BARBARA DEMICK, author of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove and Nothing To Envy
Fascinating and important. Carlos Barragán has constructed something full of warmth and empathy, both intimately personal and globally relevant – DIPO FALOYIN, author of Africa Is Not A Country
If Carlos Barragán’s The Yahoo Boys were merely a picaresque tour of the world of Nigerian scammers, it would have been worth it for the entertainment value alone. In his hands, however, this is a technically sophisticated, emotionally acute, and sociologically wise exploration of a shadow economy driven by devices, loneliness, and global inequality. It’s an enviable feat of reportage and writing - as intrepid as it is sympathetic – GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS, author of A Sense of Direction
Barragán brings a surprising depth and empathy to The Yahoo Boys, to the tin roofs and traffic jams of Lagos, the SIM cards and Apple IDs that buttress this edifice of deceit. He’s gone rappelling into the bottomless pit that surrounds desire. The result is a compassionate, elegant, unsettling book * HARPER’S *
[A] deeply reported and richly empathetic account * BLOOMBERG *
Through four sensitively crafted portraits of young Nigerian scammers, Barragán shows us young men caught between hard luck and hard choices … A wonderful accomplishment – MARK DE ROND, star of Predators
Carlos Barragán has nailed it, capturing the mystery of internet romance scamming. He is a remarkable ethnographer, filled with empathy for both victimizers and victims: impoverished Nigerian adolescents full of dreams, and his own mother, who yearns for love and companionship. Most importantly, we learn that both sides of this tragic global equation suffer deeply. I wish all anthropologists could write as grippingly, empathetically and clearly as does the reporter Barragán – PHILIPPE BOURGOIS, author of In Search of Respect, pioneering ethnographer of underground economies
A provocative view of the grift from inside the grifters’ unenviable world * KIRKUS *
[An] outstanding debut … There are plenty of eye-popping details, yet the book is most noteworthy for its affecting humanisation of both the Yahoo Boys - impoverished young men scrambling to survive - and their victims, made vulnerable by the West’s loneliness epidemic. A remarkably empathetic view of both sides of the con * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review) *
Barragán’s first book deftly weaves together the complicated legacy of the West African enslavement trade and British colonial rule, the corruption and rampant inflation of modern-day Lagos, and the individual life stories of several Yahoo Boys to present a holistic overview of the methods, motives, and means by which romance scammers flourish in Nigeria * LIBRARY JOURNAL *

Carlos Barragan is a reporter and researcher at the New York Times based in Spain. Raised in Madrid, he earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. The Yahoo Boys is his first book.

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