Cybercriminals (Yahoo Boys) and Society by Suleman Lazarus

This book offers a comprehensive sociological account of cyber-enabled fraud in Africa south of the Sahara, centred on Nigeria but extending across Ghana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Jamaica, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, conviction case files, court documents, interviews, and cultural analysis of Afrobeats music, it examines online fraud not as isolated wrongdoing but as a patterned social response to postcolonial inequality, blocked mobility, and institutional failure.

The book introduces the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework, a motivation-centred typology that classifies cybercrime as socio-economic, psychosocial, or geopolitical, shifting attention from technical mechanisms to underlying purpose. It also develops the concept of Hustle Kingdoms, underground fraud “academies” that mimic schooling whilst binding learners through spiritual oaths, psychological pressure, and economic dependency, complicating simple victim–offender binaries. Across comparative chapters, the book connects cultural repertoires of online fraud in Africa south of the Sahara to Southeast Asian scam compounds and argues that coercion should be understood as a spectrum, from overt confinement to socially embedded and spiritually enforced control. It concludes with clear policy and safeguarding implications for prevention, policing, sentencing, and victim support.

This book will be of interest to criminologists, anthropologists and sociologists studying cybercrime, online fraud, money laundering, and informal economies. It will also be useful to scholars of cultural studies, cyberpsychology, and African studies, as well as to policymakers and practitioners working on cybercrime prevention.