The yahoo guys They are experienced scammers and openly brag about it. Photos and videos of his scam and recruitment can be found all over social media, from Facebook to TikTok. However, cybercriminals, who have links to Nigerian prince email scams, are arguably the most open on Telegram.
In groups containing thousands of members, Yahoo Boys organize and advertise their individual skills for a smorgasbord of scams. They are skilled social manipulators, who may have lasting impacts on its victims. Business email breaches, crypto scams, and phishing scams are promoted in hundreds of posts a day. Members claim to sell photo and video editing skills and entire albums of explicit photographs that can be used to build a convincing persona. Fake IDs and social media profiles that look legitimate are being sold. The scam scripts are free to download.
“The Yahoo Boys have elements of organized crime and disorganized crime,” says Paul Raffile, an intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, who has Yahoo Boys investigated for sexting teenagers and driving them towards suicide. “They don’t have a leader, they don’t have a governance structure.” Rather, Raffile says, they organize themselves into groups and share tips and advice online. Telegram did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the Yahoo Boys channels, but all three channels no longer appear to be accessible.
Digital scammers began using deepfakes as part of their romance scams around May 2022, Maimon says. “What people would do was just post videos of themselves, change her appearance, and then send them to the victim, trying to entice her to talk to them,” she says. Since then, they have moved on.
To create their videos, Yahoo Boys use several different software and applications. WIRED does not name specific software to limit people’s ability to copy the attacks. However, the tools they use are often advertised for entertainment purposes, such as allowing people to swap their faces with celebrities or influencers.
Yahoo Boys live deepfake calls are done in two different ways. In the first, shown above, scammers use a two-phone setup and a face-swapping app. The scammer holds the phone with which he calls his victim (they are mainly seen using Zoom, Maimon says, but it can work on any platform) and uses its rear camera to record the screen of a second phone. This second phone has its camera pointed at the scammer’s face and runs a face-swapping app. They often place the two phones on stands to ensure they don’t move and use ring lights to improve conditions for a real-time face swap, the videos show.
The second common tactic, shown below, uses a laptop instead of a phone. (WIRED has blurred real faces in both videos.) Here, the scammer uses a webcam to capture your face and software running on the laptop changes your appearance. Videos of the setup show that scammers can see their own face next to the altered deepfake, with only the doctored image being displayed during the live video call.