Sextortion is a growing threat to children in the Western world. Criminals across the globe have increasingly used this practice to obtain money from unsuspecting children they find on social media.
The Yahoo Boys is a group based in West Africa that is notorious for its cybercrime activities. It appears these people are one of the primary drivers behind the increase in sextortion cases.
The FBI recently issued a warning about the rise of sextortion and cautioned parents to protect their children from the perpetrators, who operate by convincing kids and teenagers to send them sexually suggestive photos. After receiving the images, the perpetrators blackmail the children into sending them money in exchange for not publicizing the pictures.
The Yahoo Boys have orchestrated many cases of financial sextortion. The name of the group dates back to the late 1990s in Nigeria to describe young men who engage in various forms of online fraud. Over the decades, the group has evolved into a more sophisticated sextortion operation.
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) told NBC News that “sextortion is a transnational crime threat that is actually causing a significant number of American deaths,” referring to the victims who commit suicide after being targeted.
NCRI, a nonprofit, found cybercriminals used the social apps Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz to find and connect with their marks.
Yahoo Boys’ tactics gained popularity among some as a way to get rich quickly in West Africa, where there are scant other means of earning income, according to a 2023 Atavist investigation. Popular songs referencing Yahoo Boys have lent the cybercriminal gangs cultural clout.
Despite increasing amounts of reported sextortion online over the last several years, the NCRI researchers say that platforms used by Yahoo Boys and other threat actors have been slow to moderate their materials or make changes that could help curb the spread of sextortion.
Along with sextortion, the Yahoo Boys also run romance scams to trick lonely people into sending them money under false romantic pretenses. They pose as a man or woman who seduces a victim through social media, getting them to develop romantic feelings for the criminal. Then, they manipulate their mark into giving them money. But even this activity has evolved to a point that the criminals can even con their targets into aiding them with other crimes.
Romance scams aren’t just about stealing money anymore. Scammers often follow a playbook that allows them to literally copy and paste their sweet nothings to multiple victims simultaneously while running other shady operations at the same time.
A new wrinkle is that scammers are now using their romance victims as accomplices – getting them to facilitate everything from check fraud to business email compromise schemes to money laundering.
During an interview, a former Yahoo Boy explained:
We have people we call vendors, they are normally based in Kenya and they are the money men, they work with the payments. When I ask a client to pay me, they receive the money, they control the accounts and give me a percentage.
The Yahoo Boys often recruit its members online, publishing training content for those interested in participating in the sextortion scams. In fact, it appears the material is not difficult to find.
The NCRI researchers said they found dozens of videos on TikTok and YouTube that showed self-described Yahoo Boys engaging in sextortion by using easily searchable phrases like “blackmail format” or hashtags like #YahooBoys. They also found scripts on Scribd teaching others how to extort their victims using similar search terms. The materials on the various sites had been viewed over half a million times, according to the NCRI analysis.
NBC News and CNBC reviewed some of these materials still up on all three platforms. One video posted to YouTube instructed viewers on how to “catch a client,” keep them engaged by acting “like a real girl,” and how to convince them to send increasingly explicit photos. The video contained a walk-through on how to threaten a victim and coerce them into sending payments, at which point the narrator admitted this activity would be “high risk.”
A document posted to Scribd contained a script with seductive and explicit enticements leading to escalating threats. The document said, for example, “You ready to comply with me? I will make you so miserable that you can’t even think … I will send your nude to lots of people online … Do you want this to happen – yes or no. If you do not want it to happen you will have to pay me.” And later, “How much you got there[?] If you are thinking of 200$ forget it I’m posting your nude and gonna make you die in pain.”
Law enforcement agencies in the United States and Nigeria have stepped up their efforts to combat the Yahoo Boys. Federal agencies have constantly warned about the dangers this group poses to children. Some social media companies, while initially slow to address the matter, have also started to take action to remove accounts that engage in these activities.
However, the challenge remains substantial, especially with social media companies being slow in trying to find and remove Yahoo Boys’ accounts and content from their platforms. It will likely take some type of collaboration between law enforcement and Big Tech to tackle this problem.
But in the meantime, much of the responsibility for shielding children from these groups will fall to the parents, which is why it is of the utmost importance to ensure that people are fully aware of their children’s online activities. Otherwise, the list of victims will become even more numerous.
