"Yahoo Boys" Crow about Scamming in New Video

This week's New Times feature details my foray into the world of scambaiting -- the practice of turning the tables on email scammers by playing along as a gullible victim -- with advice from a worldwide scambaiting site called 419Eater whose main administrator lives in Broward County.In Nigeria, the people...

By Gail Shepherd

November 4, 2009

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This week's New Times feature details my foray into the world of scambaiting -- the practice of turning the tables on email scammers by playing along as a gullible victim -- with advice from a worldwide scambaiting site called 419Eater whose main administrator lives in Broward County.

In Nigeria, the people who run 419 scams -- those pesky, fraudulent emails that fill up your spam folder promising payouts of millions of dollars -- call themselves "Yahoo-yahoo Boys," after their favorite email service. It's been estimated that 250,000 internet scammers operate in Lagos alone, and the promise of easy money from gullible Europeans has created an industry centered around internet cafes, where teen-aged boys and girls congregate to send out mass emails. Or, as pictured in the video after the jump, they just work from home (discussed in this excellent article).

Above, African hip-hop artist Olu Maintain celebrates the Moet and Hennessey that goes along with being a Yahoo Boy. And after the jump, another much more explicit new song by Prince Hollywood -- not in English, but you get the drift. Those are definitely "Benjamins" they're throwing around.

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