As soon as The draft boy responds to the phone, I recognize his boom voice. I have spent the weeks immersed in the back catalogs of the influential person of video and voice notes. The draft boy is not like other affected people: he does not show his face, and he will not tell me his real name. He is not posting inspiring materials or demanding attractive brand deals. Instead, he is teaching his audience how to orkstrates high-paying online scams.
The format boy – as he styles himself on YouTube, Telegram, Instagram and X, where he has collected thousands of followers and racks hundreds of thousands of views – Yahoo works as a collective advisor to West African fraud known as boys.
Usually these cyber criminals, most young men, work with their phones or laptops, for rich foreigners -often tell Americans about their life saving. Some have started using face-swapping and deepch to increase their griff. In a recent development, Yahoo boys posted fake CNN broadcasts with AI-rented newscasters, designed to trick people that they are blackmailing them thinking that they are out on the news.
Often located in Nigeria, Yahoo boys make a detailed relationship with their victims in weeks or months, before they withdraw the cash that they can withdraw. They are not the most technically refined scammers, but they are tight and skilled social engineers. Victims in the US, Britain and other places have lost millions of people for Yahoo boys in recent years, and many teenage boys have allegedly killed after being blackmailed and sexted by them.
Yahoo boys have their own vocabulary – a kind of code – which helps them run scams (and potentially avoid social media moderation teams). The victims are called “customers”. “Bombing” involves messaging hundreds of online accounts whether one gives answers. Scams are known as “format” (hence the name format boy). And there are formats for all occasions. Romance and dating formats try to fall in love with people; Police and FBI officials are copied in copying scams; The format of Elon Musk pretends to be Santibilionaire. Investment scams, gift card scams, the list moves forward. Hundreds of scripts, which can be copied and pasted a victim directly, floats around the Internet. One is called “50 questions to ask his customer as Yahoo Boy”.
Yahoo is a complete culture around the boys. They pose with luxury cars and wear wide ornaments. On social media, hundreds of pages and groups, often clearly using “Yahoo”, claim to advise new people, teaching them the skills that they need to thief people, and provide them to the equipment to do so.
The format boy is more prominent, or at least clear, these posts are often flagged by cyber security researchers who track Yahoo boys.
“I am going to teach you how to make a fake video call in this video,” the draft boy says at the beginning of his most popular YouTube video. The dramatic music is made onscreen as a deep -fic video call. A brief text banner states that it is only for educational purposes. Six of the most popular videos of Format Boy, in fact, are all about making deepfec, with others how Yahoo Boy Scam works. “Fake video calls are very important,” he says in a voice note on Telegram. “Sometimes your customers cannot issue any information without looking at you on camera without looking at you physically.”
Illustration: Manual Shatin
Format Boy began working around 2019, using a cheap phone to spam potential victims on dating sites. From there he joined the business of teaching people to teach his ways and sell them software, guides and equipment. But on the phone with me, the draft boy is in a hurry to remove himself from the scam. “It’s not anything I really do personally,” he says, a claim he repeats many times, although he believes that he has at least some hands experience. “At some point I was doing it, but I finally stopped, and I started doing … I went to video editing and AI research,” they say.
He complains that in the last three years, YouTube has removed its channels several times, resetting its follower’s count on each occasion. When pushed, he admits that the one who posts online can help people break the law. “I will not lie to you. This is the truth; it is encouraging them,” they say. He is the most active on his telegram channel, where he regularly sends messages and sends voice notes – a few to nine minutes to his 15,000 customers for a long time. Their posts recommend things such as ways to build a trust with “clients” to get access to their bank accounts, and recommendations and proposals for AI software that Yahoo Boys can use to change their appearance on video calls with potential victims. In a post, he avoids a Valentine’s Day pracharak proposal on this deepfeek software – 60,000 Nigerian Naira (about $ 38) was reduced to 15,000 ($ 9.50).
