Like Karen Hao’s recent “Empire of AI,” which demonstrated how the whiz-bang new world of artificial intelligence relies on miserable labor practices in low- income countries, “The Yahoo Boys” puts the lie to our image of technology as a realm of inevitable progress. Barragán has stared into the void, and on the other side, staring back, was not superintelligence but a gaggle of meth-addled teenagers.
While the Yahoo boys don’t entirely escape opprobrium, they are not the only villains in Barragán’s book. The history of misrule and pillage first by the British and then by homegrown elites is invoked as a reason that so many in Nigeria find themselves desperately scrabbling for their daily bread.
Barragán doesn’t simply leave it there: He is also highly critical of “the cages of isolation that tech companies have built, and monetized, with astonishing success.” As the Greek philosopher Kostas Axelos once put it, “Technologists only change the world in various ways in generalized indifference.” Barragán’s Yahoo boys surf that indifferent infrastructure, exploiting platforms and payment systems that weren’t designed with victims in mind, and in the book’s most remarkable passages, Barragán delves into just how alone scammers and scammed both feel.
At one point, he tracks down a Yahoo victim in rural America whose life has been destroyed by a scam artist. She describes the “five-second window” — the simple need to be acknowledged by another human being, even just for five seconds — that hooked her.
“It’s the saddest crime in the world,” another victim tells Barragán.
Barragán’s characters are vivid; they inspire sympathy and plumb the depths of wickedness. In the closing pages, we meet Miracle, a Yahoo girl. (Barragán met vanishingly few female scammers because, as he puts it, “they were more discreet, more calculating and, in many ways, smarter about their illegal activities than their male counterparts.”) Barragán sketches her tragic life story, which involves human trafficking and rape — but before the reader can feel out-and-out sympathy, we learn that she is even more dastardly and effective than the other subjects. She has, Barragán explains, built a new scam based on adoption.
In the end, Miracle scams Barragán out of taxi fare, ghosting him for an interview — and the author is forced to acknowledge the uneasy tension of how a relatively wealthy journalist relates to a subject who hails from poverty. “We were just like another victim,” Barragán writes, “waiting for someone who would never come.”
THE YAHOO BOYS: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers | By Carlos Barragán | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 287 pp. | $29
