Kuginzi:
By Victor Ayeni

In a bid to evade strategies deployed by law enforcement agencies to end their illegal activities, fraudsters, commonly known as ‘Yahoo boys’, who primarily exploit digital cyberspace to defraud unsuspecting members of the public of their hard-earned money, now resort to various shady means, including seeking spiritual protection to hide their identities, Victor Ayeni writes.

The EFCC officials, acting on a tip-off about some suspected fraudsters residing in an estate in the Lugbe area, invaded their compound and in the process, caused a commotion that woke the 26-year-old, making his heart pound rapidly.

Confused and disoriented, Marcel peeked through his curtains, saw an EFCC van parked outside and heard the law enforcement officials moving into his neighbour’s apartment.

With a sense of urgency, the Imo State indigene picked up the phone he had been using for over two years to scam unsuspecting people and rushed to the restroom.

“My hands were shaking but my brain was working like a clock. An idea came into my head to wrap my phone in a nylon bag and that’s what I quickly did. A voice in my mind told me to hide the phone in the toilet tank, but another voice told me they would find it and I would be busted.

“I decided to dip the phone in the toilet bowl and shove it in the connecting pipe. That phone is what I used for ‘bombing and grinding’ and if EFCC finds it, I’m done,” Marcel confessed to Saturday PUNCH.

In Nigeria, Internet fraudsters, aka Yahoo boys or G-boys, are known to make a living by defrauding people online and offline.

Two of the slogans used by members of this criminal network are “bombing” which means finding a victim online and “grinding” which refers to chatting with a victim. These victims are often called “clients” or “magas.”

Before Marcel could fully comprehend what was happening to his neighbour – whom he claimed to be a G-boy – the door to his room was flung open with a force that sent it slamming against the wall.

Several EFCC officers stormed in, their flashlights sliced through the darkness that permeated Marcel’s room. One of the officers stepped forward, and with a stern expression, he said, “We are EFCC, stay where you are.”

As the young man sat there, frozen in a mixture of fear and bewilderment, the officers began their meticulous search. They rifled through his drawers, upended his mattress, and scattered his belongings across the floor.

“Show me your phone,” one of the officers shouted, his tone brooking no argument. Marcel told our correspondent that he denied having a phone as he had recently lost it.

He said, “I don’t think they believed my lie. One of them quickly pointed at my charger which was still plugged into an electric socket and told me ‘Is that not the charger to your phone? What are you charging with it?’

"As I tried to lie, I felt a slap across my face which made me see stars and planets. I started to cry, begging them that I was not a Yahoo boy and that I was just a shoemaker. I showed them the set of sandals I recently made, and they took it and flung it to a corner of the room. It was then I knew it was over for me.

"They started to rummage through my room, searched my drawers, and threw down all the boxes on top of my wardrobe. My room looked like a tornado had swept through it. Then one of them went into the restroom. From where I was seated, I could see him looking through the toilet tank and checking the toilet bowl but didn’t see my phone. Eventually, they all left my room.”

After an hour, when the EFCC enforcement officers had left, Marcel borrowed a phone from one of his neighbours and called his mother, Bridget, who resided in Lagos.

Bridget, a fervent member of a popular Pentecostal church is aware of her son’s involvement in Internet fraud. She had been functioning as a spiritual adviser who prayed for Marcel’s protection from the authorities.

Marcel added, “My mother was almost weeping on the phone. She thought I had been arrested because she had a dream earlier that month that EFCC arrested me and she warned me. She prays for me and I believe so much in her prayers. I believe it was what saved me from being arrested on that day.

"Most of the G-guys living in our flat and estate were arrested, they even arrested some innocent people. One teenage boy who came to stay temporarily with his aunt was one of those arrested. I’m very sure that if they had seen my phone, I would have been caught because it is my hustle pack.”

‘Nigerian princes’

In the early 2000s, a phrase known as ‘Yahoo boys’ was coined to describe young, financially driven persons who utilised Yahoo.com’s email accounts to execute phishing scams, also known as ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ or ‘419 fraud’ in the Nigerian slogan.

According to Infosecurity Magazine, Internet fraudsters are the original ‘Nigerian Princes,’ who have shifted in recent years to conduct elderly fraud, fake job scams, and romance scams.

Meta clampdown

In its Q1 2024 Adversarial Threat Report on Wednesday, Meta Platforms Incorporated, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced that it removed 63,000 accounts associated with the notorious ‘Yahoo boys’ scammers.

https://punchng.com/why-we-disguise-as-alfas-pastors-seek-spiritual-protection-yahoo-boys/