The Romance Scammer on My Sofa. Plenty of the men never replied to Natasha, but it was striking how many did. Even more striking was how quickly some of them seemed to fall for her. James said that he was 56 and rode a Harley. After sending Natasha pictures of his bike, James told her, unprompted, how he would perform oral sex on her. Other men were starry-eyed. There were also sentimental types, like Brett:. I think the only dream I have is if I had a special woman with me.
Would you please send me a few of your pictures? I would really like to see you. Her silence would have been callous if she was who she said she was. The person sending messages to Brett, James, and dozens of other American men was named Richard, but he preferred to be called Biggy.
He was 28 and from Nigeria. The photos he used in the Facebook account where he posed as Natasha—a year-old single mother from Wisconsin, interested in economic development and cryptocurrency—were pilfered from the social media of a real woman named Jennifer.
The hustle is the same as real life, with just one difference: You have to pretend to be another person. In Nigeria, Yahoo boys are online fraudsters.
Their nickname comes from the email service Yahoo, which became popular in Nigeria in the s, and they are descendants of the infamous scammers, who, first with letters, and later in emails, promised to help strangers get rich for a nominal advance fee. The number is a reference to a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud. Biggy is a particular kind of Yahoo boy: a romance scammer who pretends to be other people online to seduce foreigners into trusting him and giving him money.
