Spanish Man Travels To Lagos In Search Of Mother’s Romance Scammer

When Carlos Barragan encouraged his divorced mother to try online dating, he hoped she would find companionship. Instead, the experience led him on an unexpected journey to Lagos in search of the Nigerian scammers behind her online romance.

Barragan’s mother soon met a man who introduced himself as Brian, a US soldier serving in Syria. To her, he appeared almost too perfect to be true.

“The guy looked incredibly handsome. My mom would talk about him as if he were this prince that had appeared in her life,” Barragan recalled.

Just two months into the relationship, Brian allegedly told Barragan’s mother that he wanted to move in with her and bring gold bars he claimed to have discovered in a terrorist cache.

Barragan immediately became suspicious.

His investigation eventually led him to an IP address in Lagos, Nigeria, rather than Syria, confirming his fears that the man his mother had fallen for was not who he claimed to be.

The discovery devastated his mother but also forced Barragan to confront a deeper problem: her vulnerability had been amplified by loneliness.

“How was it possible that this man thousands of kilometres away could fool my mom that way?” he wondered.

Seeking answers, Barragan travelled to Lagos, where he began meeting people involved in online fraud and trying to understand how they operated.

Among those he met was Biggy, a 29-year-old man who still lived with his parents. Barragan described him as intelligent, funny and caring, yet he was also involved in targeting older people in the United States through online romance scams.

The experience left Barragan struggling to reconcile the personalities he encountered in person with the deception they practised online.

“I kept thinking, wow, how does someone like him become a scammer who spends his nights talking to lonely people on the internet?” he said.

Rather than encountering the highly sophisticated criminal networks he had imagined, Barragan said he found many young people operating with little formal education and using nothing more than phones and internet access to manipulate victims.

“I didn’t find them that sophisticated. I didn’t find them that smart… That blew my mind,” he said.

According to Barragan, several of the scammers he encountered described the same basic strategy: giving lonely people attention and creating an emotional connection.

That attention, he discovered, could become extremely powerful.

Barragan also met Azeez, a 15-year-old boy who lived with his mother and baby sister in a cramped apartment. He learned that Azeez had used the first $5 he made from scamming to visit a restaurant and eat chicken, describing it as his first experience in a place with air conditioning.

The encounter complicated Barragan’s understanding of the people behind the scams. While he remained conscious of the devastation suffered by victims, including people who had lost substantial amounts of money, he also began to understand some of the difficult circumstances surrounding the young men he met.

After meeting more than 50 scammers and speaking with victims, Barragan returned to his mother with a lesson he said went beyond Nigeria.

For him, the experience highlighted the extent of loneliness in Western societies and how that loneliness can create opportunities for online fraudsters.

“These young boys, some of them don’t even finish secondary school. That they managed to get money from us… is a reflection of how lonely we are right now,” he said.

Barragan’s journey eventually became the basis for his book, The Yahoo Boys, in which he explores the world of Nigerian internet fraud, the young people involved and the victims caught in their carefully constructed online relationships.

His experience also left him with a simple warning for anyone navigating online romance: when someone appears too good to be true, there may be a reason.

Source: BBC