As soon as Format Boy answers the phone, I recognize his booming voice. I’ve spent weeks immersed in the influencer’s back catalog of videos and voice notes. Format Boy isn’t like other influencers: He doesn’t show his face, and he won’t tell me his real name. He isn’t posting motivational content or seeking lucrative brand deals. Instead, he’s teaching his audience how to orchestrate high-paying online scams.
Format Boy—as he styles himself on YouTube, Telegram, Instagram, and X, where he has amassed thousands of followers and racked up hundreds of thousands of views—acts as an unofficial adviser to a collective of menacing West African fraudsters known as the Yahoo Boys.
Typically these cybercriminals, mostly young men, work from their phones or laptops to con wealthy foreigners—often Americans—out of their life savings. Some have started using face-swapping and deepfakes to enhance their grifts. In one recent development, Yahoo Boys posted fake CNN broadcasts with AI-generated newscasters designed to trick people they’re blackmailing into thinking they’ve been outed on the news.
Often based in Nigeria, Yahoo Boys build elaborate relationships with their victims over weeks or months before they extract whatever cash they can. They’re not the most technically sophisticated scammers, but they’re agile and skillful social engineers. Victims in the US, UK, and elsewhere have lost millions to Yahoo Boys in recent years, and multiple teenage boys have reportedly taken their own lives after being blackmailed and sextorted by them.
Yahoo Boys have their own terminology—a code of sorts—that helps them run scams (and potentially avoid social media moderation teams). Victims are called “clients.” “Bombing” involves messaging hundreds of online accounts to see if someone responds. Scams are known as “formats” (hence the name Format Boy). And there are formats for all occasions. Romance and dating formats try to get people to fall in love; cops and FBI officials are mimicked in impersonation scams; Elon Musk formats pretend to be the centibillionaire. There are investment scams, gift card scams, the list goes on. Hundreds of scripts, which can be copied and pasted directly to a victim, float around the internet. One is called “50 Questions to Ask Your Client as a Yahoo Boy.”
There’s a whole hustle culture surrounding the Yahoo Boys. They pose with luxury cars and wear elaborate jewelry. On social media, hundreds of pages and groups, often explicitly using “Yahoo” in their names, claim to mentor newcomers, teach them the skills they need to con people, and provide them with the tools to do so.
Format Boy is one of the more prominent, or at least obvious, of these “scamfluencers”—his posts are often flagged by cybersecurity researchers who track the Yahoo Boys.
“I’m going to be teaching you guys exactly how to make a fake video call in this video,” Format Boy says at the start of his most popular YouTube video. Dramatic music blares as a deepfake video call is made onscreen. A brief text banner says it’s for educational purposes only. Six of Format Boy’s most popular videos, in fact, are all about creating deepfakes, with others detailing how Yahoo Boy scams work. “Fake video calls are very important,” he says in a voice note on Telegram. “Sometimes your clients cannot release some information to you without seeing you physically, without seeing you on camera.”
Illustration: Manuel Cetin
Format Boy started working around 2019, using a cheap phone to spam potential victims on dating sites. From there he got into the business of teaching people his methods and selling them software, guides, and tools. But on the phone with me, Format Boy is quick to distance himself from scamming. “It’s not something I really do personally,” he says, a claim he repeats multiple times, although he concedes he has at least some hands-on experience. “At some point I was doing it, but I eventually stopped, and I started doing … I went into video editing and AI research,” he says.
He complains that over the past three years YouTube has removed his channels multiple times, resetting his follower count on each occasion. When pushed, he admits that what he posts online could help people to break the law. “I won’t lie to you. That’s the truth; it’s encouraging them,” he says. He’s most active on his Telegram channel where he regularly sends messages and rambling voice notes—some up to nine minutes long—to his 15,000 subscribers. His posts give advice on things like how to build up trust with a “client” to gain access to their bank accounts, and recommendations and offers for AI software that Yahoo Boys can use to change their appearance on video calls with potential victims. In one post, he touts a Valentine’s Day promotional offer on this deepfake software—reduced from 60,000 Nigerian Naira (about $38) to 15,000 ($9.50).