Scammers calling themselves Yahoo Boys are among the most prolific on the web. Surprisingly, they don’t try to hide at all and are very easy to spot on social media.
If you have experienced the beginnings of the consumer Internet, you have certainly heard of a email scam involving a Nigerian prince. Became a kind of joke to designate a attempted fraud so obvious that there is no risk of being fooled, however, it persisted for a long time. The idea was to send an email pretending to be a member of the Nigerian royal family (which doesn’t exist) and promising to give you money. Except that before that, you have to send it yourself or provide personal information.
This type of message almost no longer exists, but it gave birth to a whole generation of scammers still active today: Yahoo Boys. Often based in Nigeria, they have used this name since the time when they mainly targeted users of Yahoo services. Today they are hundreds of thousands organized as a bunch of small groups acting more or less independently of the others. The Yahoo Boys are among the most dangerous of their kind. It is therefore very surprising to learn thatthey act in broad daylight with complete impunity or almost.
Despite their dangerousness, these Internet scammers don’t even try to hide
By looking to learn more about them, the Wired teams found that it was very easy to find Yahoo Boys on many platforms : Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube… On Mark Zuckerberg’s social network alone, there are more than 16 clearly identified groupsfor a total of 200,000 members approximately. There is also a dozen WhatsApp and YouTube channels or 20 TikTok accounts. Scammers are also present on the Scribd document sharing service.
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Such an online presence is incomprehensible to Kathy Waters, co-founder and executive director of the organization Advocating Against Romance Scammers. “They do not hide under different names. They sell scripts, photos, people IDs, all online, on social media platforms“. Because this is the goal of all these groups: share the best methods to scam people.
The “scams” set up by the Yahoo Boys are numerous. They can pose as the police, the FBI, a doctor, or even a person looking for love. This type of approach is very popular in the field, and one can easily find scripts sometimes several dozen pages long of which you just have to copy/paste elements during an online conversation. “I’ve seen scripts 30-60 layers deep before the scammer has to find something else to say“, explains Ronnie Tokazowski ofIntelligence for Goodwhich works with victims of cybercrime.
Lately, the Yahoo Boys have been responsible for a wave of sextortion in the USA. This type of scam involves convincing someone to send sexual photos to the scammer. He then threatens the victim to distribute them if they do not pay a certain amount. This scourge has tragic consequences and the Yahoo Boys are “responsible for the suicide of dozens of teenagers“, recalls Paul Raffile, analyst at Network Contagion Research Institute who actively searches for group members.
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Contacted by Wired, all affected platforms have removed the channels or documents mentioned. However none explains why the Yahoo Boyz were able to operate for a long time with complete impunity. On Scribd, one of the files shared was from 2020. It is very likely that this barely delays members unfortunately, especially since they are very quick to adopt new channels or technologies. Paul Raffile points out that the Yahoo Boyz now use theartificial intelligence to create “cloned voices“, Or “deepfake tools to communicate directly with victims“.