Cybercrime in West Africa: Scam economies, youth aspiration and failed development
The Scam Economy in West Africa: Cybercrime, youth aspiration and failed development
For many people of the early internet generation, one of the first memorable encounters with online deception in the 1990s and early 2000s was the infamous “Nigerian prince” email: an implausible tale of frozen millions, a plea for help, and the promise of a generous reward. Scammers typically claimed to be members of a persecuted royal family who needed assistance moving money out of the country. In return, victims were promised a generous share of the fortune. They were then asked to pay upfront “fees”, taxes, legal costs, or bribes before the money could be released. The promised fortune, of course, never materialised.
These so-called “advance-fee” frauds offered an early glimpse of a cybercrime industry that has since grown into one of the most profitable and adaptive criminal enterprises in the world. A recent global assessment estimated that scams and fraud generated more than US$1 trillion in 2024, roughly 1% of global GDP, while 57% of adults worldwide reported some form of scam exposure in 2025 (Amerhauser & Goodwin 2026).
Parts of West and Southern Africa, especially Nigeria and Ghana, have become significant nodes in the global cybercrime economy. Nigeria ranked fifth and Ghana thirteenth globally in the 2024 World Cybercrime Index. These activities target victims across Africa, but they are also global in reach. In the United States, cybercrime losses are now measured in the tens of billions of dollars annually, and West African networks have been linked to several high-volume scam economies, especially business email compromise, romance fraud and sextortion (see Figure 1).
In response, governments, international organisations and law enforcement agencies emphasise the need for better policing, stronger cybercrime legislation, improved investigative capacity, international cooperation, and investment in technology, equipment and training. These responses are important, particularly given the speed with which criminal networks adapt to new technologies such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and encrypted communication platforms. However, a narrow focus on policing risks missing a deeper point. Africa’s growing role in cybercrime, especially in West Africa, must also be understood as a development problem. The expansion of the scam economy is rooted in the development failures that have shaped many African economies since the 1980s. Structural adjustment, deindustrialisation, precarious labour markets, weak job creation, and unequal forms of integration into the global economy have left many young people highly connected to global images of wealth, mobility and consumption, while denying them stable routes into employment, adulthood and social recognition.
Policymakers often characterise cybercrime as the ‘dark side’ of globalisation: a consequence of criminal deviance that exploits the forms of digital connectivity, access to global markets, financial networks and cross-border communication that have driven rapid economic growth. Yet, cybercrime is also shaped by the contradictions of globalisation itself: a system that promises inclusion, wealth and mobility, but often delivers insecurity, exclusion and deeply unequal access to the legitimate economy. For many young Africans, globalisation has created a world in which they are connected to global opportunities symbolically and technologically, but excluded from them economically and socially. In this context, participation in cybercrime can become one way, however risky and exploitative, of navigating blocked mobility, unemployment and frustrated aspirations. Cybercrime is not only the dark side of globalisation; it is also one of the products of its failures.
As the rest of this essay goes on to show, cybercrime in Africa should therefore be understood as both a criminal justice challenge and a symptom of failed development. The growth of scam economies in places such as Nigeria and Ghana cannot be explained simply by weak policing, criminal deviance, or technological opportunity but require responses that address the development challenges that drive it.
The rise and rise of Cybercrime in West Africa
Since the early ‘Nigerian prince’ advance-fee frauds, West Africa’s scam economy has expanded, diversified and continually adapted. What began with relatively simple email-based fraud has developed into a much wider ecosystem of cyber-enabled crime, including advance-fee and non-delivery fraud, romance and relationship scams, investment fraud, sextortion, phishing, identity theft and business email compromise (see Figure 1).
West Africa became a particularly important site for this economy for several reasons. Countries such as Nigeria and Ghana have large populations of relatively well-educated young people, high levels of English-language ability, and long histories of outward migration and transnational social connection. These factors made it easier for scammers to communicate with victims in North America and Europe. Expanding internet access, mobile phone use and digital payment systems further increased opportunities for cyber-enabled fraud. West Africa’s time zone, positioned between the United States and Europe, also made real-time communication with foreign victims easier than in many other parts of the world (Button et al. 2024).
By the 1990s and 2000s, cheaper computers, internet cafés, public libraries and globally accessible email platforms allowed online fraud to expand rapidly. The widespread use of Yahoo email accounts by early fraudsters gave rise to the label “Yahoo Boys”, which became shorthand for young men involved in internet fraud, especially in Nigeria. Over time, however, the term came to describe not only a type of scammer, but also a wider social world of aspiration and illicit entrepreneurship. In popular culture, the figure of the Yahoo Boy became associated with fast money, conspicuous consumption and the pursuit of status in contexts where legitimate pathways to employment and social mobility were often blocked.
The sector has also become more organised and professionalised. The past decade has seen the emergence of so-called “hustle kingdoms”: informal or semi-organised cybercrime training ‘schools’ where more experienced scammers teach newer recruits how to carry out online scams, providing practical training, scripts, technical advice, mentoring and access to networks, lowering the barriers to entry for young people who may not have advanced technical skills (Lazarus & Soares 2024). Confraternities have also played an important role in parts of this cybercrime economy. Groups such as Black Axe began as Nigerian university-based brotherhoods whose original purpose was to provide male students with solidarity, identity, mutual support, protection, status and access to influential social networks. Over time, some confraternities have evolved into transnational criminal networks (Lazarus 2025).
Technological change has lowered the barriers to entry even further. Would-be scammers no longer need advanced coding skills to participate in cybercrime. Scam scripts, phishing kits, fake websites, stolen data, ransomware packages, tutorials and laundering services can all be bought through encrypted platforms such as Discord and Telegram. West Africa’s cybercrime economy remains highly diverse. It includes small-scale individuals working alone, loose peer groups, semi-organised training networks, confraternity-linked structures and more sophisticated transnational criminal organisations.
The limits of law enforcement
The policy response to cybercrime in Africa has intensified for obvious reasons. The FBI estimates more than US$50 billion in losses from BEC scams between 2009 and 2023, while romance fraud remains financially and psychologically devastating for victims (FBI, 2024). One recent study notes that in the US alone romance-fraud losses reached about US$1.3 billion in 2023 (Button et al. 2025).
Police and international agencies have responded with a growing number of crackdowns. In 2024, Operation Serengeti, coordinated by INTERPOL and AFRIPOL across 19 African countries, authorities made 1,006 arrests, identified around 35,000 victims and uncovered nearly US$193 million in associated losses (Associated Press 2024). These operations show that intelligence sharing and coordinated enforcement can disrupt networks, recover money and expose transnational criminal linkages. But they also reveal how limited even major crackdowns remain against the scale of the wider scam economy.
The development crisis beneath the scam economy
Part of the reason policing responses to cyber-fraud have limited success is that they are pushing against a much wider set of structural pressures that drive the scam sector.
The first driver is economic precarity. Poverty alone cannot explain the growth of large scam economies: many poor places do not become major centres of cyber-fraud. But combined with the enabling conditions in parts of Western and Southern Africa highlighted above, including good education standards, English-language skills, internet access, proximity to European and North American time zones, and familiarity with Western cultural references, scam work has become a viable livelihood option experiencing severe poverty and facing insecure, unstable, poorly paid and informal work.
Nigeria illustrates this wider development crisis. The oil boom of the 1970s had raised expectations of prosperity, social mobility and state-led development, only for these aspirations to be dashed by the debt crisis, austerity and economic decline of the 1980s. The country’s scam economy took root amidst the prolonged economic crisis that followed, which generated unemployment, insecurity and declining confidence in formal routes to advancement. The later spread of the internet then opened new ways to earn from abroad. Nigeria remains heavily dependent on oil, which still accounts for the overwhelming share of exports and a large proportion of government revenue. Yet this revenue structure has not produced broad-based, secure employment. Instead, the economy has repeatedly been shaped by volatility, corruption, debt pressures and vast economic inequality which manifests in conspicuous consumption for a small minority alongside economic hardship for most. Recent labour-market data underline the problem. Only a small minority of workers are in wage employment, while the overwhelming majority are self-employed or working informally. Recent reforms, including fuel subsidy removal and currency devaluation, were intended to stabilise public finances, but they also fuelled inflation and a severe cost-of-living crisis.
The second driver is frustrated youth aspiration. Nigeria has a young population, with two-thirds the age of 30. Many young people have some education, digital literacy and strong aspirations for mobility, consumption and social recognition. But there are too few secure jobs to absorb them. The result is a large gap between what young people are encouraged to desire and what the economy allows them realistically to achieve, leaving many to experience am erxtended period of ‘waithood’. First used in studies of youth transitions in the Middle East and later developed in African studies by Alcinda Honwana (2012), waithood refers to a prolonged period in which young people are no longer children but are unable to achieve socially recognised adulthood. They may be old enough to work, marry, live independently and support relatives, but they cannot secure the stable income, housing or status required to do so. Scam economies thrive in this gap between intensified aspirations and blocked opportunities. Young people are encouraged to be ambitious, entrepreneurial and globally connected, while formal labour markets offer few credible routes to wealth, mobility or recognition. Fraud then becomes, for some, a form of illicit entrepreneurship: a way of pursuing socially valued goals through illegitimate means.
The third driver is a shifting moral economy around scam work. In some communities, cyber-fraud has become not only tolerated but admired. Successful scammers may be seen as smart, resourceful and generous, especially when they redistribute money to family members, friends, churches or local networks. The figure of the scammer can become associated with agency and survival: someone who is ‘hustling’, ‘making it’ or refusing to remain poor. Such narratives are reinforced by perceptions of an unfair system. In contexts marked by corruption, inequality and political impunity, some rationalise fraud as a way of navigating a world already structured by deception. Interviews with romance-fraud offenders in Ghana found that some framed fraud as a form of reparative justice for colonial exploitation, a form of ‘reverse extraction’ whereby wealth taken from Africa can legitimately be reclaimed from predominantly white and Western victims (Lazarus et al. 2026). This rhetoric does not excuse the harm done, but it does show how scammers morally neutralise their actions by recasting theft as historical redress.
Tackling cybercrime as a development challenge
The rise of cybercrime in West Africa is therefore not simply a story about criminal deviance and innovation, but also about failed development, blocked futures and unequal global integration. This is not to glorify or justify an industry that causes immense harm, but it highlights that responses focused only on policing and moral condemnation will remain inadequate if they ignore the development crisis that underpins the scam economy.
If cyber-fraud draws strength from blocked youth transitions, intense inequality, thin formal employment, corruption and widely shared narratives that legitimate deception, then the response must include credible youth employment pathways, functioning education-to-work transitions, stronger local institutions, and forms of development that reduce exclusion rather than merely managing it as a security threat. If young people are told to be entrepreneurial, self-reliant and globally connected, while the formal economy offers only informal work, unstable income and blocked adulthood, then illicit entrepreneurship will remain one route through which aspirations are pursued.
Current policy responses to the scam industry risk epitomising what Mark Duffield (2007) famously termed the ‘development-security nexus’. Duffield warns that contemporary development has moved away from a political project concerned with global equality and redistribution, and towards a security project concerned with managing instability among those excluded from global prosperity. Development, in this framing, becomes less about transforming the structures that produce inequality and more about containing the disruptive effects of that inequality. Applied to cybercrime, the danger is clear: African youth become framed primarily as risks to be managed, disciplined or surveilled, rather than as citizens whose exclusion from meaningful economic futures is itself part of the problem.
The challenge, then, is not to choose between policing and development. Cybercrime requires both, but enforcement must be embedded within a wider development agenda. Otherwise, cybercrime will be treated as a problem of deviant individuals rather than as a symptom of a global order that connects people without including them equally.
저자 소개
패트릭 미한(Patrick Meehan)(patrick.meehan@manchester.ac.uk)은
맨체스터대학교 평화·분쟁연구 강사이며, 「불법경제, 분쟁, 발전」 과목을 강의하고 있다. 런던 SOAS 대학교에서 개발학 박사학위를 받고 폭력, 분쟁, 불법경제, 개발 등을 연구 주제로 삼고 있다. 특히 미얀마와 동남아시아의 국경지대 및 변경 지역에 초점을 맞추고 있으며, 이 지역에서 거의 20년에 걸쳐 연구를 수행하며 여러 연구를 발표했다. Journal of Peasant Studies (2024)의 ‘불법 마약작물 경제(Illicit Drug Crop Economies)’ 특집호와 International Journal of Drug Policy(2021)의 ‘마약, 분쟁, 개발(Drugs, Conflict, and Development)’ 특집호를 공동 편집한 바 있다.
Dr. Patrick Meehan (patrick.meehan@manchester.ac.uk) is a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester where he convenes a course on Illicit Economies, Conflict and Development. Patrick Meehan has received his doctorate degree in Development Studies at SOAS University of London. His research addresses issues of violence, conflict, illicit economies and development. His work focuses particularly on Myanmar and the borderland and frontier regions of Southeast Asia, where he has conducted research for almost two decades. He has published widely on these topics, including co-editing two Special Issues on ‘Illicit Drug Crop Economies’ in the Journal of Peasant Studies (2024) and ‘Drugs, Conflict, and Development’ in the International Journal of Drug Policy (2021).
참고문헌
Amerhauser, K. and Goodwin, A. (2026) A World of Deceit: Mapping the Landscape of the Global Scam Centre Phenomenon. Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Associated Press (2024) ‘Interpol clamps down on cybercrime and arrests over 1,000 suspects in Africa’, AP News, 26 November.
Button, M., Gilmour, P., Hock, B., Jain, T., Jesperson, S., Lazarus, S., Pandey, D. and Sabia, J. (2024) Scoping Study on Fraud Centres: Ghana, India and Nigeria. Brighton: Itad.
Button, M., Lazarus, S., Hock, B., Sabia, J.B., Pandey, D. and Gilmour, P. (2025) ‘Factors influencing involvement in cyber-frauds in West Africa and the implications for policy’, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-025-09649-6
Duffield, Mark. Development, security and unending war: governing the world of peoples. Polity, 2007.
FBI (2024). Internet Crime Report 2023.
Honwana, A. (2012) ‘“Waithood”: Youth transitions and social change’, in Development and Equity: An Interdisciplinary Exploration by Ten Scholars from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Hague: International Institute of Social Studies.
Lazarus, S., & Soares, A. B. (2024). From business centres to Hustle Kingdoms: historical perspectives on innovative models of deviant education. International Annals of Criminology, 62(3-4), 449-468.
Lazarus, S. (2025) ‘Cybercriminal networks and operational dynamics of business email compromise (BEC) scammers: Insights from the “Black Axe” confraternity’, Deviant Behavior, 46(4), pp. 456–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2024.2352049
Lazarus, S., Hughes, M., Button, M. and Garba, K.H. (2026) ‘Fraud as legitimate retribution for colonial injustice: Neutralization techniques in interviews with police and online romance fraud offenders’, Deviant Behavior, 47(3), pp. 427–448. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2024.2446328
