In 2015, Carlos Barragan, a young Spanish journalist working for The New York Times, received a surprise - his mother, having long being single, told him she finally met somebody on Tinder. The man's name was Brian and he was an American soldier stationed in Syria. Carlos' alarm bells however, started going off immediately - and sure enough, he quickly tracked "Brian's" IP address not to the US, but to Lagos, the capital of Nigeria.

Being intent on finding the scammer himself, he travelled to the country only to find himself embedded into the culture of the so-called Yahoo Boys - poor young men, who saw scamming Westerners as their only ticket out of the slums.

Carlos' extensive experiences in Nigeria gave birth to his reportage book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers, which has been t ...