When the Internet began to gain a foothold in West Africa in the late 1990s and early 2000s, young people quickly realized that with just a click of a mouse they could now reach people in North America and Europe who had more money and were potentially vulnerable to blackmail.
Then came the “Nigerian prince” letters, a well-known scam used by online scammers – known as Yahoo Boys in Nigeria, Sakwa Boys in Ghana and Brouteurs in Ivory Coast – who prey on unsuspecting victims across the internet. The emails usually featured someone posing as a Nigerian royal and asking for money, a claim so outlandish that victims assumed it couldn’t be a lie.
For most people, internet cafes on and off school campuses were the only way to surf the internet. Young men saved or borrowed money to “buy time,” as the tickets were called, to quickly tweak letter templates and send them to large numbers of recipients in the hope of a windfall given Nigeria’s high unemployment rate.
As telecom companies slashed data subscription prices and security guards began hunting down letter-writers, more scammers invested in home connections and resorted to newer techniques – targeting elderly foreigners, cryptocurrency scams, compromising emails containing trade secrets, catfish romance scams and online pyramid schemes – to increase the success rate. And then there’s the fast-growing scam of sextortion: the art of blackmailing people to get money for sexual footage in the perpetrators’ possession.
The rise of global fintechs and the multitude of payment options that come with them has also broadened their target audience to include more people. In parts of Ghana and Nigeria, apartments are springing up that have been converted into incubator campuses called “Hustle Kingdoms” (HK) or academies: groups of young people, some as young as 13, stay there and learn the basics of fraud.
They are increasingly inspired by an aspirational lifestyle known as “Dorime culture,” named after the global dance music megahit “Ameno Amapiano Remix.” The culture revolves around lounges and nightclubs across Nigeria, where patrons compete in ostentatious purchases of expensive alcohol to show off how rich and popular they are.
Titi Adesanya, operations manager of the African branch of music label Empire, said: “(People) want to see their name in the lights and see a beautiful girl walk towards them with drinks and the whole club stops… human beings are selfish and egotistical by nature.”
The new dream of many youths, especially in suburban areas, is to drive flashy cars and have young girls admire their every move. This love of the spotlight has driven many into cybercrime, such as Ramon “Hushpuppi” Abbas, the Instagram influencer who served 11 years in prison in New Jersey for money laundering after targeting his victims with online scams.
However, his case does not have a deterrent effect: Instead, minors who want to get involved in fraud are becoming more and more creative.
“When you hear that a 12-year-old boy has been sent to prison… (it is) because he has colluded with some authorities and made an age declaration (false affidavit) saying he is 18 just to be able to open a (bank) account and set up his criminal structures,” says Effa Okim, director of the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), in charge of Edo, Delta and Ondo states, which are considered a hub of cybercrime.
In recent months, there has been a wave of arrests in connection with sextortion in Nigeria.
Two men were arrested and charged in March after an Australian teenager took his own life last year. Days later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Michigan announced the extradition of two brothers from Lagos in another sextortion case being investigated by the FBI.
According to U.S. law enforcement, West Africa, particularly Nigeria and Ivory Coast, is home to many perpetrators of sextortion. In late July, technology company Meta announced the closure of 63,000 Nigerian Facebook accounts used in these scams, which mainly targeted adult men.
The rise in sextortion crimes prompted FBI Director Christopher Wray to fly to Abuja in June to meet with Nigerian President Bola Tinubu to discuss, among other things, cooperation in the fight against cybercrime. That same month, the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission signed a contract with the FBI to establish a cybercrime research laboratory.
“(This) will significantly enhance our ability to prevent, detect and prosecute financial crimes,” EFCC Chairman Olanipekun Olukoyede said at the time.
The rise of these cybercrime academies, which are producing a “new generation of skilled individuals with malicious intent,” would harm Nigeria’s “economy, national security and international reputation,” said John Odumesi, an Abuja-based cybersecurity expert. He said the government must immediately address “the cultural influences of the Dorime phenomenon and the promotion of alternative values.”
