World of Crime's Major Threats for 2026: Nigeria's Yahoo Boys
An alliance with the Black Axe has allowed Nigerian scammers to rapidly level their threat to real-time deepfake video calls, sextortion, romance scams, and BEC to an unprecendented scale.
Nigeria’s decentralized cybercriminal networks known as the “Yahoo Boys” built their reputation on advance-fee email scams targeting overseas victims.
But this ecosystem has not remained static.
By the early 2020s, Yahoo Boys had shifted toward romance fraud and business email compromise, higher-yield schemes built on psychological manipulation rather than narrative invention. Since then, their arsenal has continued to expand.
AI-generated profiles, real-time deepfake video calls, and integrated laundering pathways can move funds through multiple jurisdictions in hours, expanding their scope and profitability. This has all been made possible through a clever interconnection with one of Nigeria’s most sophisticated criminal networks: the Black Axe.
Training that had previously circulated through encrypted chat groups and informal tutorials became systematised. Recognisable “format writers” and scamfluencers emerged, marketing their expertise as packaged instructional services.
The sextortion of minors has shifted from a marginal tactic into an industrial operation. Between 2022 and 2024, reported sextortion incidents targeting children in North America and Australia increased by more than 1,000 per cent, with the overwhelming majority traced to operators based in Nigeria. Over 20 suicides linked to these schemes have been documented in North America.
There has been some pushback. Police operations in 2024 and 2025 have arrested hundreds of suspects in Nigeria, extraditing key operators, and disrupting online training platforms. But this revealed an ecosystem that had already metastasised. Yahoo Boys have embedded themselves across global social media platforms, financial networks, and now confraternity structures.
They are now a criminal enterprise operating across five continents.
