Carlos Barrágan just wanted to understand what had happened to his mother. How could she, an accomplished, professional, middle-class woman who had raised three sons on her own, fall prey to a romance scammer pretending to be a U.S. soldier in Syria who was likely in reality a young man based in Lagos, Nigeria? As first detailed in his 2023 feature for the Atavist magazine and now expanded into his first book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers, Barrágan, a journalist in Madrid, thought he was going to find some measure of justice for his mother, and also take a closer look at the male loneliness epidemic.
What he discovered, through this outstanding work of immersion journalism (written in English, his second language), was a far more complex story at the intersection of a persistent economic crisis; global hungers literal and metaphorical; and the brutal need to survive at all costs. In the United States alone, romance scams target nearly one in 10 adults aged 50 and over, leading to more than $1.1 billion in total losses as of 2023—“the highest reported losses for any form of imposter scam,” according to the Federal Trade Commission.
