The Yahoo Boys

A New York Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of 2026 A Vulture Best Book of the Year So Far A People Best Book of June | A USA Today Most Anticipated Summer Read "A nonfiction book which really knocked me out . . . It's incredible . . . An extraordinary piece of reporting." -Patrick Radden Keefe, The Long Game podcast "What [Barragan has] produced feels miraculous: journalism that is simultaneously funny, devastating, wildly intimate, and righteous without veering into moralism." -Kate Knibbs, Wired (Book Club Pick) An astonishing work of immersion journalism about four young romance scammers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring how and why they scam, and the moral dilemmas they face When his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragan came face to face with the human toll of online romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he set off on a journey to Lagos to find his mother's scammer, where he stumbled on a much bigger story. There, in a crowded and impoverished neighborhood in the midst of Africa's largest city, he encountered thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves "Yahoo Boys," and each year they catfish millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones. In this astonishing work of immersion journalism, Barragan takes us inside the lives of four of the Yahoo Boys of Lagos. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor's apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria's economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he's responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky he manipulated online for years.…