Does he seem too good to be true? It might be because he’s a romance scammer called a “Yahoo Boy” who wants to steal your life savings.
BUSINESS INSIDER
The Yahoo Boys are an online crime group based out of Nigeria that creates fake online personas and uses them to target victims, according to the Department of Justice. Once gaining the victims’ trust, the scammers use a pretense to solicit money, like the need to pay an emergency medical expense.
Last year alone, the FBI’s Internet Crime Report estimated that Americans lost more than $650 million to romance scams. The Federal Trade Commission, which casts a wider net, reported that, in 2022, these scams netted a whopping $1.3 billion. Many of the victims are older and targeted for their life savings, family inheritances, and retirement funds.
Kate Kleinert, a 69-year-old widow, previously told BI that she lost $39,000 to an online romance scam. By the end Kleinart said she had lost most of her savings, her late husband’s life insurance, pension, and income from Social Security.
“Losing the money — that was devastating. But losing that love and the thought of that family that we had? That’s what crushed me,” Kleinart told BI.
And if it wasn’t bad enough, the scam is becoming more sophisticated alongside the latest technology. The Yahoo Boys now uses AI to create deepfakes to dupe even the most alert internet users. Over the last two years, the Yahoo Boys started experimenting with deepfake video clips and video calls, according to Wired.
“Deepfakes” leverage AI to replace the likeness of a person in a video or audio clip. David Maimon, a professor at Georgia State University and head of fraud insights SentiLink, told Wired that the scammers using deepfakes often set up calls through Zoom. They use a webcam paired with software that changes their facial features.
