The Yahoo Boys Quotes

“I knew I risked shifting the focus from the victim to the perpetrator, but the story wasn't that simple. Western media had long pushed the idea of the defenseless, gullible victim being conned by a ruthless, heartless scammer. I believe that by showing the real face of the scammer and challenging those stereotypes, I could paradoxically restore the victim's humanity and our sense of responsibility toward them. The perpetrator, in many cases, was also a victim of a world that had failed them long before he picked up a phone.”
― Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos

“It's easier to believe that your father, your friend or even you were conned by a powerful syndicate than a hungry teenager in a Lagos slum with too much time on his hands and too little hope. But once you accept it, once you see that boys like Aziz are the ones duping our parents, you're forced to reckon with something harder, the depth of loneliness in our own society and the cages of isolation that tech companies have built and monetized with astonishing success.”
― Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos

“All I could see was a boy who claimed to need love and instead grew into a man who destroyed others trying to find it.”
― Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos

“I empathized with her from the start. She was a single mother with a son my age. That one detail made her familiar. It made her pain legible. It made me call out Chibuike's bullshit whenever he claimed to love her. But the more I found myself making that comparison, the more uneasy I felt. ... Why did I need to reason to resemble my mom in order to feel for her? I was using my mother as a kind of emotional proxy, a short cut to empathy, but wasn't that a version of the same failing I called out in Chibuike? ... We say we care about others, but often we mean others who look like us or who remind us of someone we already love. When we don't deem other people real, it's easier to mock them, minimize the harm or look away. As I tried to unlearn the short cuts I used to access empathy ...”
― Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos

“She was an embodiment of the disorienting contradictions that trauma leaves behind.”
― Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos