Civic Towers, Victoria Island, Lagos Nigeria. Photo credit: Nupo D. Daniel/Unsplash

As Nigeria cements itself as one of the largest economies in Africa and a nation that has been steadily increasing college enrollment over the past few decades, the nation’s smartest still resort to cybercrime over work in the formal economy. The culture of cybercrime as a means to make quick money in Nigeria began in the 1980s and 1990s with the famous “Nigerian Prince Scam”, where fraudsters overseas pretended to be royalty who claimed to be able to unlock great fortune with a smaller upfront fee from their victim. This practice morphed and grew with the advent of the internet and, while prevalent around the world in places like India, China, and Brazil, Nigeria became most recognizable and culturally synonymous with cybercrimes like romance scams. The rise of cybercrime coincides with Nigeria enrolling over one million students into tertiary education, expanding on a trend of increases in higher education over the last few decades. However, because of the formal economies weaknesses and failure to keep up with an increasingly educated and globally connected youth workforce, young educated Nigerians are resorting to international cybercrime.

The Yahoo Boys are Nigeria's most well-known cybercrime group, consisting primarily of young people in Lagos in their late teens and early twenties who assume false identities to defraud victims, often through romance scams on dating platforms.  In Carlos Barragan’s book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers, he describes his mother being victimized by a Nigerian teen who impersonated an American soldier in Syria on Tinder who showed romantic interest. While the scam schemes may seem obviously fraudulent, Yahoo Boys often victimize people from the West that are lonely enough to believe false realities. Many factors play into why Nigeria is ground zero for internet scams such as Nigeria being an English majority speaking country. However, societal and economic factors are making cybercrime an intriguing endeavor for educated youth populations.

Since internet scamming became widespread in 1990s Nigeria, the practice has increasingly been viewed as a legitimate source of income and an aspirational pursuit for many young Nigerians. During that period, Nigerian cybercrime was limited to traditional 419 scammers, who convinced victims they would receive a large fortune in exchange for a much smaller up-front fee. These scammers were unemployed, poor, and often uneducated, but utilized a progressively more interconnected world to show a new lucrative form of low-risk crime. Young Nigerians began to take notice, and a second wave of internet scammers entered in the mid-2000s, where young, college-educated Nigerians utilized their knowledge to streamline internet scamming. This is also where the “Yahoo Boy” identity developed, especially on college campuses. Many young Nigerians entering the workforce witnessed internet scammers living lavish lifestyles, which created a sense of aspiration to be an internet scammer themselves. While internet scamming has turned into an attractive career path for educated Nigerians, the main reason for widespread cybercrime stems from an economy that is unable to keep up with education that fails to offer educated Nigerian youth enticing and lucrative alternatives.

Despite having the third largest economy in Africa according to the IMF, Nigeria is in the middle of the pack of African nations in terms of unemployment which sits around 5 five percent, and eight percent for ages 18-24. However, analysts believe this is an understatement, as part-time work like street-vending, motorcycle taxi driving, and other irregular work can classify someone as employed despite not providing a living wage. While the Nigerian economy does have opportunity for this kind of informal labor, appealing jobs to educated workers are few and far between. Furthermore, Nigeria's GDP is heavily reliant on its oil industry which is capital-intensive but not labor intensive, creating an industry that generates the country billions of dollars without creating a substantial amount of jobs, ultimately reducing incentive to mobilize skilled workers. As a result, many educated Nigerians enter a labor market where their skills are undervalued, making cybercrime appear to some as one of the few viable paths toward economic mobility. 

Cybercriminals in Nigeria have always utilized a globalizing world to maximize a network of potential victims and as the world becomes even more connected, and new technologies like artificial intelligence and methods of financing like cryptocurrency emerge, Nigerians have more tools at their disposal to maximize profit and minimize risk of punishment. Policing digital cross-border crimes like romance scams fall in a gray area of international law. For example, while a victim may be in the United States, and a perpetrator may reside in Nigeria, the bank account of the perpetrator may be centered in Dubai, while the server runs in Singapore as an example. Furthermore, forms of payment may be in Cryptocurrency, making transactions virtually untraceable for state actors. No single country maintains jurisdiction over the whole crime. And with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, savvy Nigerian scammers can replace manual tactics with automated methods and deepfake technology to not only improve their deceptions, but also run their scam on a wider scale. Now, AI-generated romance scams can run 24/7 more efficiently by eliminating red flags like non-perfect english or culturally fishy references. Nigeria’s cybercrime problem reflects a larger global problem of nations unable to keep up with technological capability. As internet access and education on cutting-edge technologies become widespread, economies must be able to grow to accommodate the growing work force of digitally skilled workers, so that the same skills that fuel innovation are not otherwise funneled into sophisticated cybercrime networks. 

Nigeria’s complex cybercrime problem cannot be simply explained by high levels of poverty and unemployment. It instead represents a disconnect between a weak formal economy and a growing number of educated workers, technological advancement, and globalization. Over the past few decades, Nigeria has produced a large pool of ambitious workers, but has not produced enough formal economic opportunities to match their skills. This rise of the Yahoo Boys crime network shows how education alone is not enough to produce economic development and that countries also need to equip their young populations with opportunities to excel.

Author Bio: Patrick Slover is a Junior at Boston University studying International Relations and Political Science. This semester, he is studying and interning abroad in Shanghai, where he is continuing to build his foreign language skills and contribute to research on sustainable policies and practices for businesses, communities, and state actors.