Loud screeching sounds of vehicle wheels were immediately followed by a deafening bang; then shouts of despair filled the air. I peered through my rear mirror only to discover that the brand new Mercedes-Benz GLK SUV, which zoomed past me a few seconds ago at top speed on the other side of the road, had just crashed.
Driven by a journalist’s inquisitiveness, I immediately slowed down, parked my car way off the road and walked back to the spot of the crash, just a few poles away. By the time I got to the spot on the Miriam Babangida road in Asaba, Delta State, a huge crowd had already gathered.
Some young men were trying to force the doors of the wrecked car open to rescue the occupants. The car had scaled the drainage embankment and crashed into a concrete pole. ‘’I talk am say na Yahoo boys them be’’, a middle-aged woman exclaimed, just as the teenage driver, about 19 years old, was being helped out of the badly damaged car. He had a deep bleeding cut just an inch above his right eye, caused by a piece of glass from the broken windscreen.
Soon, three other youths with varying degrees of injuries were brought out. ‘’I know these boys, they are into Yahoo-Yahoo, shouted a young man in the crowd. ‘’These Yahoo-Yahoo boys are mostly associated with substance abuse; only someone high on drugs or alcohol could drive the way he did. That’s how they drive recklessly in this town, increasing the rate of accidents on our roads’’, added another bystander, whimsically.
On enquiry, the teenage driver, who was obviously under the influence of alcohol, said with an air of arrogance that he bought the car barely a week ago and decided to go out with his friends to ‘’wash it’’ (a local parlance for celebrating a new achievement with food and drinks) for them.
This scenario reignited my worry about the rate at which many Nigerian youths are joining the fast and dangerous lane to acquiring quick wealth through internet fraud, popularly known as ‘’Yahoo-Yahoo’’.
The growing trend of internet fraud among the youth population in Nigeria has not only assumed an alarming proportion but also become a national debacle, leaving in its trail, severe consequences for youths, families, society and the nation’s image.
Some of the factors responsible for the continuous rise in internet fraud among youths include parental neglect, the desperation for quick wealth, resolve to escape from poverty, lack of employment opportunities, flagrant display of ill-got wealth by some members of society, and social media, where cybercrimes and make-believe affluent lifestyles are promoted.
Internet or cyber fraud refers to any deceptive or fraudulent activity carried out through the internet to deceive individuals or organisations for financial gain or to steal sensitive information. It encompasses illegal activities like scams, phishing, identity theft, and other online crimes designed to trick victims out of their money, property, or valuable data.
Internet fraud is generally known in Nigeria as ‘’Yahoo-Yahoo.’’ The term gained popularity with the rise of Yahoo Mail after its launch on October 8, 1997. It later became a common slang for internet fraud in Nigeria. Internet fraud as known today started in the form of postal letters and fax scams in the 1970s. It later metamorphosed into scamming people via the Yahoo internet search engine at cybercafés, which sprang up in different cities in the late 1990s.
Cybercafés, therefore, provided a hub for internet fraud, with fraudsters, mostly youths, using them to interact with and scam potential victims in Nigeria and other countries. With the adoption of personal computers, including laptops and internet-enhanced devices such as Android phones in the early 2000s, cyber fraud transitioned to more sophisticated techniques.
The first known Nigerian youth to be convicted for internet fraud was Olasaidi Dare, an undergraduate of the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye, Osun State, Nigeria. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in April 2012 for attempting to obtain money under false pretences in a cybercafé. Since then, hundreds of youths across the nation have been arrested, prosecuted and jailed for the same offence.
However, rather than this societal scourge abating, it is spreading rapidly among our youths, including undergraduates and secondary school students, like a debilitating virus, even as Yahoo training centres are continuously springing up in major cities across the country.
Government, school authorities, parents, and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have been involved in efforts to stem the tide. Government’s efforts towards combating this hydra-headed issue of Yahoo-Yahoo among Nigerian youths included the establishment of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) on December 12, 2002, by an Act of the National Assembly. The agency, however, commenced operational activities on April 13, 2003, following the appointment of its first Executive Chairman, Nuhu Ribadu. Continue next week.
