Young men who set up international romance scams have evolved from “Yahoo Boys” to “A I Boys!
Alarming Document [Part 1] Gathering in a dimly lit room in an impoverished African town, they use smartphones to scam people out of large sums of money.
Misused technology
The deep, deep cleavage around her flabby breasts is unintentionally stunning. Jason (pseudonym, 20), a Nigerian man with blonde hair and long, flashing eyes, was operating his smartphone with a familiar hand as he explained that this beautiful woman was “a regular person I picked up from the Internet. It was image processing by the generative AI “Grok. A few minutes later, the blonde beauty began to move and speak in a charming pose.
Hello! How are you doing?”
Then, with a bewitching smile, she lightly stuck out her tongue as if to provoke her opponent.
Lagos is the largest city in Nigeria. In a room of an apartment in this city, which is home to one of the largest water slums in the world, Jason began to talk matter-of-factly.
I’ve been sending AI-generated videos to my foreign “daters” (Nigerian for “romance scammers”) since last year or so. Much better.
Romance scams are a type of scam in which a person pretends to be someone else and uses social networking services or matching apps to trick a target into falling in love with him or her for money. According to the National Police Agency, there were 5,604 cases in Japan in 2013, and the amount of damage was 55.2 billion yen, up 38% from the previous year.
In Nigeria, many young people like Jason are involved in romance scams and other cyber crimes, and were known locally as “Yahoo Boy” (Yahoo! Boy). The name derives from the fact that they used to use Yahoo Mail for scams.
Until two or three years ago, romance scams were mostly conducted by pretending to be someone else using photos found on the Internet, but this made it difficult to immediately respond to a target’s request to “send a video” or “talk on the phone,” and the scammer was sometimes exposed as a fake.
However, the introduction of AI has made it possible to process and generate images and videos, making the technique more sophisticated. AI has transformed them from Yahoo-boys to “AI-boys,” who use photos of movie actors, musicians, and other celebrities as material for their imposters. The ease with which the crime can be committed with just a smartphone also adds to the abuse.
The modus operandi is as follows.
After a long period of neglect, they purchase a hijacked Facebook or Instagram account on a black market website, impersonate that person, and contact foreigners at random.
When they receive a response, they communicate with the foreigner via DMs, and when they become close, they fabricate an emergency situation where money is needed, such as the illness of a family member or the failure of a business, and ask the foreigner to send money. There is also a pattern of solicitation to invest in crypto assets and the like.
During this exchange, they send a video like the one shown at the beginning of this article to make the recipient trust them.
From the April 10, 2026 issue of FRIDAY
Photography and text by： Takehide Mizutani (Nonfiction writer)