Multiple Faces Detected
October 28th, 2020
When scrolling on Facebook, we often think that groups who are plotting to steal people’s money would be easily deleted. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case, considering that you can search up “Yahoo boys” in the search bar, and many groups filled with scammers will come up. They discuss selling old Facebook accounts of victims, PayPal accounts, credit card information, and phone numbers constantly within these groups. People have spread awareness about this on many Facebook groups, such as our member’s only Facebook page SCF Seekers and Scam Haters.
Where Did Yahoo Boys Come From and Where Are They Today?
Their name comes from when they would use their Yahoo email accounts to spam people, back before social media networks ever existed. At first, they formed little gangs at the Nigerian university, the University of Lagos and were constantly on their laptops. Now, they rent office spaces where their literal career is to scam their victims. They start fake charities, create fake accounts, and have even put their fraud money into businesses.
A lot of these men have nice clothes and cars, which tells the people of Nigeria that they are a part of the Yahoo Boys without them having to utter a word. Their Instagram accounts have hundreds of followers, since they are able to buy fake followers on the whim. They are super wealthy because of their daily career of scamming women (and sometimes men), not caring about the emotional toll they put their victims through.
Why Do Yahoo Boys Communicate on Facebook Groups?
Scammers look for other scammers that are selling hacked accounts, stolen PayPal accounts, stolen credit card information, new “clients” for sale that they can scam, and many more things. They use the groups to converse with one another about how to hack an account, how to scam better, and how to make as much money as they can. It’s basically a community of scammers that can converse with one another about clients, or anything else they want to.
What Are Clients?: The victims of a romance scammer.
What Do Yahoo Boys Post on These Pages?
These are all the Facebook posts the scammers have posted within the groups. They all range from the scammers trying to sell Facebook accounts, to trying to get phone numbers and asking for account details from victims. There’s also one where a scammer asks to “operate a successful yahoo,” which means to operate a successful romance scam.
This is an advertisement posted on one of the Yahoo Boys pages, basically advertising to make fake websites for these scammers. As you can see, scammers can make fake websites out of basically anything they want to as long as they successfully steal money from their victims.
These are all scammers’ notes on what to say to his victims to make them fall in love with him, as well as what looks like log-in information to scam accounts. There also seems to be a note on what to say to a victim when asking for Bitcoin. There are also notes that tell the scammer to claim to his victim that he has an adopted son, and how to collect funds from his “client” aka victim.
Both of these Facebook group posts claim that these scammers are selling ATM card information and debit card information of some sort. This may mean that once a scammer gets a hold of your financial or personal information, that it could go to one of these Facebook groups for multiple scammers to use when committing identity fraud. That’s why you always need to remain cautious by keeping your personal information to yourself.
Both of these scammers are asking other fellow scammers how to do a fake video chat in order to fool their victims. This is why if you’re video chatting someone you meet online, make sure their lips are matching what they are saying and that there is no delay. If there seems to be a ridiculous slow delay and the voice isn’t matching the person’s mouth, this may be a sign you are talking to a scammer who is doing a fake video chat.
What is Facebook’s Community Policy?
According to Facebook, fake accounts are not allowed and will be removed once reported. These accounts include fake pet accounts, business or organization accounts, and those that were created with malicious intent. Along with this, fraud/deception grops, cruel and insensitive content, false news, and manipulated media are also not allowed on Facebook.
Romance scammers and the Yahoo Boys all make fake accounts with malicious attempt to scam their victims out of money. The Yahoo Boys Facebook groups are filled with information on how to buy/sell fake profiles as well as how to create fake profiles. This goes to show that they are committing fraud, are posting insensitive content, and false news.
However, when people have tried to report these pages, this is the notice they get. That the Yahoo Boys groups “don’t go against their community standards.”
How Does Facebook’s Monitoring Process Work?
According to Facebook, people flag and report the fake account or Facebook group that they deem offensive or inappropriate. The Facebook monitoring team contains real people that review each flagged group or account, and checks it for anything inappropriate. If they can’t find anything, they will send you back a notice stating that they couldn’t find what was going against the community standards. They also suggest for you to block the page or account that offends you.
However, why they did not block the Yahoo Boys pages at first is a mystery. Yes, while there have been some Yahoo Boys pages that have been removed, there are still some that exist to this day. These groups range from private access, meaning that we can’t see what the scammers post, to public access where we can see everything they post. When writing this article, I was able to find two Yahoo Boys accounts that you could see with the public eye, and the rest were private.
How Could Facebook Improve Their Monitoring Process?
Perhaps they could improve by looking at each post a group posts more in-depth to see what they are saying and what their motives are. If they say they are selling a “client” or fake Facebook accounts, that would go against their community standards to where they would need to block that group page.
For a fake account, maybe if they had access to the messages they were sending their victims they could block them as soon as they ask their victims for money. Another simple way they could determine if it is really a fake account is by scanning their profile picture and seeing if another account had that same picture. Then, determine which account is more personable and is actually posting more statuses and keep that one. They could also send out emails to these accounts to verify that its really them by sending Facebook a picture of themselves holding up fingers.
It is important to note that you could actually flag a specific post that violates community standards as well. This means that if Facebook denies your request to remove an account, just flag a post that goes against their standards and hopefully they will take that consideration.
Social Catfish is Here to Help You!
At Social Catfish, we want to help you verify the identities of those who might seem suspicious to you. If you have their name, email address, phone number, social media username, or image, you can reverse search and see who the suspected person was that you’ve been in contact with if you are trying to report a Yahoo Boy on Facebook.
