Carlos Barragan

So in a way, the scammers get scammed.

And there are many, many ways of getting the money from there.

I've met hotel owners who devise plans to serve fake alcohol to them.

I've seen boutiques selling clothes for exorbitant amounts of money to Yahoo boys who don't even care.

Obviously, women who devise ways to get the money from these boys.

So the whole community tries to survive in one way or the other.

Well, I think that when readers read the book, they see a lot of mixed feelings.

And, you know, being in Ikotun, the neighborhood in Lagos, you see people struggling so much that I'm not the right person to judge what they are doing.

And I think when you see so many young men doing it, there might be reasons why they are doing it.

But at the same time,

you cannot just say, well, it's because of poverty circumstances, because what about the young Nigerians who are not doing it?

You know, they are also facing

a dire economic crisis and still they they decide not to do it but i think it's a question that we all face and especially in hard circumstances in certain countries whether the circumstances that uh affect you are gonna push you into doing something bad and i think it's the tension between the circumstances of your life

and whether you have agency to say no to crime, for example.

So I guess that I have mixed feelings.

And as with everything, life is complex and you have to find the reasons why this is happening before tackling it.

Yeah, the first reason why I wanted to write this book was because I wanted to write a book about loneliness.

But I couldn't grasp that concept just by interviewing victims, because there is also the victim side in the book, but mainly I focus on four scammers.

But because once I was there, I spent more than six months living in Lagos.

Once I was there, I understood that to explain the loneliness epidemic in the West that we mentioned so many times, I think it was better to just do it from there, because once you see