The internet is filled with scammers and fraudsters waiting to take the money, time, and peace of mind of their victims. In Nigeria, those who engage in running these scams are called “Yahoo boys” because of the free Yahoo mail accounts they used to find victims back in the early 2000s. Yahoo Boys run a large variety of scams, but one of the most common scams the Yahoo oys run are sextortion scams. Yahoo boys build up trust with their victims, called “clients” in Yahoo boy slang, then ask for nude images. Once the scammer has the images, they reveal who they really are to the victim and demand large sums of money in order for the scammer to refrain from releasing the images.
Teenagers are particularly affected by these scams. For example, 17-year-old Jordan DeMay died by suicide after a sextortion scam. Two Nigerian brothers, Samuel and Samson Ogoshi, pretended to be a girl his age on Instagram and sent him a friend request. Once they got the images they needed, they demanded hundreds of dollars from Jordan. Jordan sent the money and threatened to kill himself if the images were released. The scammers’ response: “Good… Do that fast – or I’ll make you do it.” He died six hours later.
Very often, these criminals don’t even need to get their victims to send them nude images; AI deepfake tools can be used to turn any picture of a victim, no matter how innocent, into blackmail material. 1 in 10 sextortion incidents involve deepfake imagery. Elijah Heacock also committed suicide after scammers sent a threatening text demanding 3,000 dollars to prevent the release of AI-generated nudes to his friends and family. There have been more than 30 suicides linked to sextortion scams.
Despite the pain and suffering caused by the scams, Yahoo boys have gotten extremely wealthy. There is an entire genre of Youtube and TikTok videos where Yahoo boys show off their Rolexes, mansions, sports cars, and other expensive goods bought using their victims’ money. Some of these videos even directly show Yahoo boys scamming their victims. The Yahoo boy “Hushpuppi” was an Instagram star who was known for posting pictures of his cars, designer clothes, and helicopter trips with celebrities and Nigerian politicians. He was arrested by the Dubai police for money laundering, but there are thousands more Yahoo boys who live similar lives daily and get away with it.
These social media posts are used by the leaders of Yahoo boy groups to recruit young Nigerians to their organizations. Victims of the Yahoo boys have called for these videos to be removed. However, social media companies have been slow to do anything about the issue. Scammers are a large source of revenue for tech companies. Last year, Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, earned 16 billion dollars of ad revenue from suspected scammers, according to their own estimates. Instagram is the #1 site used by sextortion scammers according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Only a handful of these scammers have been extradited to the US to answer for their crimes, although the Nigerian government has launched many prominent raids on Yahoo Boy scam compounds. Last August, there was a global police operation against the Black Axe gang based in Nigeria. In December of last year, the Nigerian government arrested 792 people from a call center in Lagos suspected of running scams on Americans and Europeans. Despite the efforts of law enforcement in both the United States and Nigeria, Yahoo boys run their scams without much fear of legal consequences. They operate completely in the open; a WIRED investigation found 16 publicly available Yahoo boy Facebook groups with more than 200,000 members between them. Many of these groups advertise that they are intended for internet scammers, even to the point of having “Yahoo boys” in their name.
Anyone can be scammed by one of these criminals, but there are some measures which can be taken to prevent such an occurrence from happening to you. Don’t send nude pictures to anyone online or at all, really. If nude images of you do somehow end up on the internet, you can use the “Take It Down” service to help those images get removed. The “Take It Down” service is run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It creates a hash of your image and sends it to social media companies. A hash is a really long unique number based on the image. The hash can be used by algorithms to recognize the image, but it is mathematically impossible to find out what the original image was based on the hash.
