The Yahoo Boys: From prince inheritance emails to dating site scams

The "Nigerian prince" advance-fee email scam of the early 2000s has not gone away. In fact, it has evolved into a sprawling, largely open-source criminal culture that now includes romance fraud and sextortion.

The United States' Federal Trade Commission reported over USD $3.5 billion in losses to imposter scams last year, a jump from  USD $700,000 lost to imposter scams alone in 2019. One of these imposter scams is run by a collective of cyber criminals known as the "Yahoo Boys."

Laura Kankaala, Head of Threat Intelligence at global cybersecurity company F-Secure, leads the company's threat intelligence function, tracking the tactics scammers and hackers use to target consumers online. Her team relies heavily on open-source intelligence, monitoring the same platforms criminals use to organise, advertise their services, and share techniques, to build frameworks that can be shared both within F-Secure and externally.

The scam culture known as Yahoo Boys takes its name from Yahoo, the email provider first used to reach victims outside Nigeria, where the movement originated. Kankaala said the group is not a conventional criminal organisation.

"Yahoo Boys are not an organised crime group - it's not call centres, [people working] nine to five fraud everyday. It's a culture of online crime," she said.

Kankaala traced the culture's roots to internet cafés that opened in Nigeria's major commercial areas in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where early participants logged on to Yahoo email accounts to send messages, often posing as Nigerian princes or claiming a large inheritance, in exchange for an upfront fee. Kankaala said the tactic was highly effective at the time because most people were new to the internet and had no frame of reference for recognising a scam, though it has since become far less successful as email filters have improved and public awareness has grown.

She noted that a common misconception is that this kind of activity is confined to the "dark web", when in fact it plays out largely on mainstream platforms.

"A lot of these activities are happening in the internet that we all share - it's happening on Facebook, it's happening on TikTok, it's happening on messaging channels that we all use, like Telegram," said Kankaala.

She described the culture as having "open-sourced" its own knowledge base over time: scam scripts, known within the community as "formats", along with fake profile images and photographs used as fabricated proof of arrest, are shared freely across platforms, alongside a parallel market where stolen data and hacking services are bought and sold directly.

As email filtering improved, Kankaala said the culture shifted towards social media and dating apps, platforms that not only bypass spam filters but also allow scammers to build deeper personal relationships with targets before asking for money. The approach evolved from a one-sided promise of a windfall payment into sustained, relationship-based manipulation, often followed by a fabricated emergency, such as an arrest, to justify an urgent request for funds.

Kankaala said the most significant recent evolution, over roughly the last five years, has been the rise of sextortion, in which scammers ask targets for intimate images before threatening to leak them unless a payment is made. She said the sums demanded are typically modest, often in the region of USD $50 to USD $100, but the psychological impact can be traumatising.

She also pointed to a widely reported 2023 case in which a French woman was defrauded after being led to believe she was in a relationship with American actor Brad Pitt, a scam she said was linked to the Yahoo Boys culture. The woman was defrauded of USD $850,000, according to French broadcaster TF1.

"The scams that people are falling for might seem trivial and easy to spot, but when you are being threatened...when you fall in love with someone who are not who you think they are., they are deeply traumatising," said Kankaala.

Conversations often begin on dating apps before moving to WhatsApp or Telegram, where messages cannot easily be scanned. She said public awareness and a willingness to take such scams seriously are the most effective safeguards, particularly when someone recognises warning signs in a friend or relative's online relationship.

"The industry and the public tend to laugh at these scams, but it's really what makes it possible for the Yahoo Boys to keep doing this, because we are not taking them seriously enough. The damage that they are doing is very real to people."