Science and Technology

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.

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.

The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers, Carlos Barrágan, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $29, June 2026

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........

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