Years after graduating from a tertiary institution in Southeastern Nigeria, Cletus Maduka* started having problems with everyone in his life: his mother, siblings, and girlfriend. “My family said I was not contributing to the upkeep of the house. My girlfriend said she’d leave me because I wasn’t taking care of her,” he tells Nigeria Abroad from his base in Nigeria’s Anambra State, having returned from Ghana after a fruitless fraud career.
It was 2019 and Maduka, 28, was running a tottering laundry business that earned him barely N500 per day. He was so depressed that he folded himself daily within his laundry shop, cutting off everyone. “I used to work, bathe, sleep, and shit there.” When his friend D, who “recently returned with nothing from Ghana” suddenly started dropping off dirty clothes at Maduka’s laundry, humiliation from life had finally run a full course, Maduka thought.
“I knew he was on the streets, so I approached him, si ya tinye m n’ife a na-alu,”—asking to be introduced to whatever was responsible for the new fortune. The Ghana returnee, Maduka recalls, even bought a car, rented a flat in Asaba, Delta State, and was circulating in designer clothes. D asked Maduka to get a laptop, or at least a smartphone for an internship in internet fraud—what Nigerians call yahoo. No such chance for a youth barely able to feed himself. Move to Ghana, D suggested, offering his connections.
“I sold everything in my shop to gather money,” the Physiotherapy graduate reveals. “I was crying while leaving. I’d miss my girlfriend, who didn’t support the move. My mum approved, maybe because she didn’t know what was taking me to Ghana.”
One September morning in 2019, Maduka arrived at Ghana’s Aflao Border after a tortuous road trip through Benin Republic and Togo. D had given him a number to call on arrival but, when Maduka called, the receiver gave him another contact, who told the fraud apprentice a rendezvous.
“He picked me at the location in a tinted Voltron (Toyota Camry),” Maduka says of his new scam boss. “They were two in the car. I was taken to an HK in Accra, a duplex, where I met like 20 boys.” HK, he explains, stands for House of Knowledge, yahoo-yahoo term for the office where fraudsters are coached.
An HK is headed by its owner designated as Chairman. But it is managed by a Senior Boy—the longest-serving intern in the House. Maduka’s Chairman, an Edo-born fraud tutor who drove the Camry, was a 25-year-old man that had paid his dues in the cyber underworld.
West African cyber criminals choose Ghana for the same reasons Twitter and other multinationals embrace the country. “Constant electricity,” Maduka explains. “Rule of law. You can move around in Ghana in the middle of the night without fear of police harassment. Police won’t come for you unless they have a solid reason to, otherwise you can sue them. Even when they catch you, you can settle, and they’ll leave you alone. If Nigerian police bust your office, they’ll take bribe and leave you, but they will keep coming. They’ll even steal your gadgets and will frustrate your life.”
Days before this interview, Ghanaian police had rescued 10 Nigerian youth trafficked into the country for yahoo-yahoo. Though Maduka came into the crime on his own, hundreds of others are lured into Ghana, Togo, Benin, even Dubai to work as fraud slaves. Whether by choice or deceit, interns are subjected to the same horror.
“The first thing they do once you enter an HK is to shave your hair completely kodo. The Chairmen are juju people. They believe shaving your hair removes bad luck from you. In my HK, we were fed twice a day, but later once in two days during COVID the next year. My Chairman was good. Other Chairmen torture boys who don’t deliver, or starve them. Some have been killed and buried in shallow graves. Others run away and join yahoo-plus”—fraud variant that employs ritual killing to spiritually manure the trade.
Then there is the moral ambivalence: Maduka’s Chairman who presides over the cyber heists leads a weekly prayer and fasting session on Fridays. “If you’re caught eating, you’ll be severely beaten,” Maduka notes about the integrity of the exercise, saying the fraud boss doesn’t joke with faith. It figures: Nigerian artiste Omah Lay sings about a loafer who robs with guns, takes hard drugs, but fears God.
Contrary to public opinion, crime is hard work. “We sleep from 12am to 3am and work till the next 12am again. Three hours of sleep every day. My eyes were swollen. The Senior Boy put me through on hacking Facebook accounts. I was asked to hack 50 accounts in days.”
Hacking Facebook accounts is the easy part, he declares. Hackers focus on Northern Nigeria where many allegedly use their names or phone numbers as passwords—a practice also common in Ghana, Togo, and some other African countries. Maduka’s first task was to “edit” the accounts he hacked—to pack them full of foreign (military) photos and other information, and then start targeting older Western women.
In two weeks, he got his first client—a Belgian woman who paid 7,000 euros in a romance scam, out of which Maduka was given less than N500,000 though the naira worth of the haul was in millions. The loot often passes through several hands—the Aza account holder, some House members, and then the Chairman owns 60%. Maduka says he was mad when he received the alert, but nonetheless distributed his share to some family members, some friends, and his girlfriend. The whole thing wasn’t worth it after all, so he told his Chairman he was going back to Nigeria. Part of his conscience was also pricked: realizing the fraud, the Belgian woman dropped him a heartbreaking voice message, crying that the money was her life savings.
Despite all the warnings about fraud, why do many foreigners still fall for romance scam? “They can be watching the warning on TV and still pay the next day,” Maduka shrugs. “In fact, sometimes, their banks tell them it’s fraud, but they insist on paying.” It’s human nature to be deaf in romantic error.
Few months in Nigeria, Maduka becomes broke and starts interning at Asaba with D, the friend who linked him to Ghana. “He’s about my age. But he turned me into his houseboy.” The relationship collapsed as failure stalked their fraudulent endeavors at the Asaba HK. He left the House and later joined two others, but fortune refused all beckoning, so he went back to Ghana—to that same Edo Chairman.
But he didn’t go alone. “The Chairman asked me to bring one boy that sells popcorn in the neighborhood. Before I left the Accra HK, I was a Senior Boy. Now I had to start all over. They kept yabbing me that I picked small money and ran back to Nigeria. I had lost my respect.” Even the popcorn boy made a hit quickly and became the Chairman’s favorite, as Maduka was still unable to net another “mgbada” and was being starved in the House.
Chairman soon audited his staff and offloaded those not winning clients, among them Maduka. “They took my laptop and phone. I left the House with 20 cedis in the streets of Ghana. Slept in the park for days until someone sent me money from Nigeria. I returned to Asaba and started with another Chairman.”
Though he later hit a client whose pay earned him N2 million, Maduka was soon broke again after using the money to sort out existing problems and having a bit of fun. Now struggling to start a decent business, he swears he’s done with “duping people out of their hard-earned money.”
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The moral shift was engineered by his conscience, he tells Nigeria Abroad. Even the Chairmen who reap richly from enslaving their proteges do nothing with the money other than womanizing and clubbing, he avers. “No investment, nothing, because they always believe that another big money is coming.”
*Maduka’s real name was changed at his request. Photo credit: EFCC.
