Cybercriminals (Yahoo Boys) and Society

Hustle Kingdoms, Occult Economies, and the Colonial Politics of Digital Fraud
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-94763-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 514 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 714 g

This book offers a comprehensive sociological account of cyber-enabled fraud in Africa south of the Sahara, centred on Nigeria but extending across Ghana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Jamaica, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, conviction case files, court documents, interviews, and cultural analysis of Afrobeats music, it examines online fraud not as isolated wrongdoing but as a patterned social response to postcolonial inequality, blocked mobility, and institutional failure.

The book introduces the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework, a motivation-centred typology that classifies cybercrime as socio-economic, psychosocial, or geopolitical, shifting attention from technical mechanisms to underlying purpose. It also develops the concept of Hustle Kingdoms, underground fraud “academies” that mimic schooling whilst binding learners through spiritual oaths, psychological pressure, and economic dependency, complicating simple victim–offender binaries. Across comparative chapters, the book connects cultural repertoires of online fraud in Africa south of the Sahara to Southeast Asian scam compounds and argues that coercion should be understood as a spectrum, from overt confinement to socially embedded and spiritually enforced control. It concludes with clear policy and safeguarding implications for prevention, policing, sentencing, and victim support.

This book will be of interest to criminologists, anthropologists and sociologists studying cybercrime, online fraud, money laundering, and informal economies. It will also be useful to scholars of cultural studies, cyberpsychology, and African studies, as well as to policymakers and practitioners working on cybercrime prevention.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lazarus, Suleman

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde
• Rechtswissenschaften Strafrecht Kriminologie, Strafverfolgung
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kriminalsoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction PART I: Framing the Terrain  Geographies of Cybercrime, Postcolonial Inequalities, and the Spatial Production of Cybercriminals; 2 The Tripartite Cybercrime Framework and the Particularities of Cybercrime in Postcolonial Africa; 3 From Student Activism to Global Fraud Enterprise: The Evolution of Nigerian Confraternities and Their Role in Cybercrime; PART II: Institutions and Infrastructures of Cybercriminal Formation  When the School Fails You, the Hustle Kingdom Trains You: The Schools That Formal Education Refused to be in Anglophone West Africa; 5 Degrees of Entrapment in Hustle Kingdoms: Spiritual Coercion and the Victim-Offender Overlap in Cybercrime Academies; 6 Do Mothers’ Hands Both Bless and Bind?: An Ethnographic Account of Yahoo Boys’ Mothers’ Associations (AYBM); 7 Is the Spirit World the Base of the Superstructure?: Empirical Evidence for Inverting Orthodox Marxism in Occult Economies; PART III: Offences, Scripts, and Networked Operations 8 Romance in Ruins and the Hustler’s Gospel of Love and Lies; 9 United States v. Olugbenga Lawal: A Forensic Ethnography of Romance Fraud, Business Email Compromise, and Transnational Money Laundering Circuits; 10 Feminist Criminology and Two Faces of Transgressive Labour: Comparing Male Online Fraudsters (Yahoo Boys) and Female Sex Workers (Ashawo); PART IV: Cultural Grammars and Regional Variants 11 Afrobeats and the Cultural Politics of Online Fraud (2007–2025); 12 Codes of Retaliation and Anti-Colonial Discourses in Digital Fraud: Ghana, Nigeria, and Jamaica; 13 Digital Hustlers Across Postcolonial Ecologies: Comparing Internet Fraudsters in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Côte d’Ivoire; PART V: Global Synthesis 14 Imprisoning the Body Versus Colonising the Will: A Comparative Sociology of Coerced Cybercrime in Southeast Asia and West Africa; PART VI: Conclusion  Conclusion: Towards a Sociological Criminology of Digital Deviance

Über Autor(innen)

Suleman Lazarus, PhD, is a Research Associate at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and the developer of the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework. He has published widely in journals, including Deviant Behavior, Critical Research on Religion, and Journal of Human Trafficking. His research explores offender pathways, human trafficking, online fraud, deception, and victimisation.