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- [00:01]
A
Mornings have a rhythm. You can hear it, feel it. And at Quaker, we fuel it with 100% whole grain oats and a good source of fiber in every bowl, helping you turn that rhythm into your soundtrack for a great day. Fuel to start whatever's next. Quaker, Official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26.
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B
I oh, let's go.
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C
I oh, let's go.
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B
Hello and happy Thursday. It is the bookcase, and we welcome all you book nerds to our podcast, either for the first time or as a loyal listener, which, if you aren't, you should be. We know where you live. No, I'm just kidding.
- [00:51]
C
And if Kate gets around to introducing me, I'm her father and I'm the second part of the bookcase with Kate and Charlie.
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B
Yeah, but they don't care so much about that now.
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C
You can go back to blathering on if you want.
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B
They don't care so much about that.
- [01:02]
C
Just kidding.
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B
It's been actually a while since we've done nonfiction, so I'm really excited about today's show. Carlos Barragan, who, by the way, when we. This is a podcast, you can't see him, but he's a very handsome young man. A journalist.
- [01:17]
C
Did notice that. I noticed you. As a matter of fact, after we hung up with him. It was the first thing you mentioned, and then the second thing you mentioned and the third thing you mentioned.
- [01:24]
B
I think actually when he went to go get like something, like a new set of earphones or something, I even mouthed the words, oh, my God, he's so good looking. Um, well, so we started this very seriously for me. Anyway, his book is called the Yahoo Boys, and I will throw it to my father, who just threw me under the bus so that he could explain what the Yahoo Boys is about.
- [01:45]
C
Carlos has written a book about scams that come out of Nigeria, and his mother got scammed, didn't send money, but got into a long conversation with somebody she didn't know. And Carlos and his brother were saying, mom, this is a scam. This is a scam. Don't send money. I think a lot of people remember that there were Nigerian princes that were asking for money years ago, and that has changed now. And Nigeria is just a part, really, of worldwide scams that are taking place. Carlos points out there's many people doing this in Southeast Asia as well. But because his mother was getting scammed, he went over to Nigeria five or six times to try and find the specific scammer that was talking to his mom. But he really got to know some of These young men who are from terrible areas of poverty and they're making money, as you'll hear in some of the specifics of the stories, as he was able to get access to some of these people and talk to them and. And actually felt somewhat understanding of their status in life.
- [02:47]
B
It can be hard to believe these are such successful schemes, but they are. And we wanted to have Carlos do a little reading from his beautiful book, the Yahoo Boys, to explain why. Why this might happen so often. So here it is. Carlos Barragan.
- [02:59]
D
In every interview I conducted with Yahoo Boys, one idea came up again and again. Tension. The scam was all about making the victim feel seen. If you give them attention, you have their heart. Biggie's friend, Smart Billion had told me another scammer I met in Abuja on my first trip after hearing my mother's story, put it even more bluntly. You must understand that victims tell everything to their scammer. Everything. Weren't 100% sure. Your mother told things to her scammer that you don't know. Things about her you've never imagined in your life. Her ambitions, her flaws, her broken dreams. They are looking for someone who will listen, period.
- [03:48]
B
Yeah, I think he does a terrific job of going into the history of Nigeria and talking about its rampant inflation and corruption and why the Yahoo boys have become in some ways a staple of the Nigerian economy, why they've been forced to, you know, And I'm really glad I know more about Nigeria. He lays out a number of different schemes, doesn't he? He lays out romance scams. You know, I really care about you, and I'm a soldier in Syria, and you need to send me money for the canteen to, you know, finance scams, celeb scams, pretending to be a celebrity.
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C
Adoption scams.
- [04:23]
B
That one's the most nefarious to me because I struggled to have a child. So adoption scams. When you can cut the air with desperation, it's amazing what you'll do. And people capitalize on that. So I walked into this book going, these no good. I mean, I didn't have a lot of empathy. And by the first 50 pages of the book, I understood where these perpetrators were coming from.
- [04:47]
C
Yeah, no, he writes somewhat sympathetically about them, somewhat, not terribly. And I think you raised an interesting issue with him, that he's very young. Too young for you, Kate.
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B
Actually, everybody's too young for me. But Carlos is 30.
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C
He's 30. And I think you brought out the fact that he was able to ingratiate himself and get to know these kids who were doing this because he was of similar age. Interesting though, as he points out, some of the kids who were operating he. He used as a base a suburb.
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B
Ecotoon.
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C
Yeah, Ecotoon, which is outside Lagos, and that was the area. And he said some of the young people that he met had never seen a white person.
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B
No. And this is my favorite because when we start the interview, which we will do soon, you'll hear that he is actually from Spain and he has a Spanish accent. So I love the idea too. He goes, some of them thought I was a Chinese businessman. And you're like, well, okay, sure.
- [05:39]
C
Anyway, the name of the book is the Yahoo. Boys. And his name again is Carlos Barragan. Right. You do a much better job with that than I do. Here's our conversation with Carlos.
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B
Carlos Parragan. It is so nice to have you in the bookcase. Your new book, the Yahoo Boys. Let's start by defining for our audience, if we could, who haven't read the book yet. And by the way, you absolutely should, because it is fascinating. What are Yahoo Boys?
- [06:11]
D
Thank you so much for having me here. Yahoo Boys is a nickname that Nigerians give to Roman scammers there. And the nickname comes from the early 2000s when most of Nigerians were using the Yahoo. Email service. And it was because it was the first one. So they scammers were using these email service and that's how they got assigned the nickname. And the word Yahoo in Nigeria is become kind of like a very charged word because you just have to mention it and Nigerians will know what you mean.
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B
You talk a little bit about the statistics of the Nigerian economy and the Yahoo Boys. I mean, is there a way to get really at the heart of how much money Yahoo scammers make in Nigeria and why Nigeria?
- [07:02]
D
It is really difficult to get estimates because there are no official estimates from either Nigerian authorities or international authorities. It's important to note that these kind of scammers, Roman scammers, also exist in Southeast Asia. So it's not only a Nigerian story, even though sometimes we might have. We might hear that it's only Nigerians. And this stereotype goes very far. But why Nigeria? It's because also there's a long tradition of these kind of impersonation scams that go all the way to the moment the British got to West Africa. So in the book, I. I tell the story of West Africans being very scared of the white man and impersonating the white man for the first time to scam all their Fellow West Africans. And then it goes all the way to the 90s when Nigerians would send letters to Americans or Europeans saying, I'm a Nigerian prince and I need your help to get $10 million. And of course they think Americans, they, they thought they need my help to get that access because I'm a one man. And of course they, they, they need me. And from the 90s, that kind of scam shifted from greed. You know, they were targeting greed to now targeting loneliness, which is probably what defines the last 20 years of the Western world.
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C
You do give me some numbers in terms of how much money they have made. I think it was in 2020 and 2021. You say think you were referring just to romance. Gaming made $2 billion. $700 million one year, 1.3 billion another year. That is to me staggering. Did it take you by surprise? Were you flabbergasted as well?
- [08:52]
D
It is a staggering number and that is the number reported by the FTC in America. And it's not only Nigerian scams. So that is like globally. But it's also important to note that that is reported losses. There's a study done by the Canadian government that says fraud is only reported by 5% of the cases because it's either you're too ashamed or you don't even know what happened or you don't know who to report it to. So that tells you that maybe way more people or way more money is being lost in this. Of course, not only going to Nigeria, but going to other countries. Now talking about Nigeria, there are people like, there's a whole debate in Nigeria with how much of this is contributing to the local economy. In a place like Ikotun, you just, you have eyes and you're like, you just see it yourself. You see that there are so many boutiques, they are selling fancy clothes and they are designed just for, they are tailored just for these young men.
- [09:53]
B
You get to know a lot of these boys very well and tell their stories over a number of years and you really had to get to know these folks and get them to talk. And so I'm interested in how you did that, how you gained their trust. I'm interested to know if you feel like it required a young journalist to go in and tell the story.
- [10:14]
D
That's a very good question. I think I was so reckless that probably required me being young and it's hard on the body, like doing reporting on the ground and seeing so much poverty. Obviously in Ecotoon, they've never seen a white man in their Life in real, like in Face to Face. And I'm going to give you an example. They thought. People there thought I was either an FBI agent, I was a Chinese businessman. But I think one element that is important is that some of the main characters of the book are my age. And I think there's a connection there, especially from the beginning of the story when I meet these boys and I humanize them. And I know that these sound too obvious, but one thing I've encountered too many times while talking about this book is that people are surprised by the empathy that you show to them. And if I go back, it's true that I was surprised that these people had three dimensional lives, if I can say that, like they were as complex and contradictory as I am, for example. And that's when I realized that there was a story to, To. To.
- [11:25]
C
To.
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D
To tell here. Because the Nigerian brains, that is serotype we have in our mind is a very flat actor, right? Like evil person who is taking advantage of the Westerners. And the same way that whenever there is a shooter in America and the media tries to understand what did it, what did it go wrong. I think we have to give that the same, the same amount of humanity and empathy to other people beyond our own countries. So in that sense, I think it helped being young because these young men shared some of the struggles that maybe all the young people around the world share.
- [12:07]
C
I know you started with this because your mom got scammed and you wanted to. You set out with the idea of trying to find the scammer and you made a lot of trips there. But what really struck me is your mom was still sending money even after you said, mom, this is a scam. What did she say to you?
- [12:28]
D
Well, she was not sending money, but it's true that she was still talking to him. When I told this is a scam. So we stopped, we stopped her right away from sending money. But there were like a few weeks where I told her this is a scam, or my brother would tell her this is scam and she would get very angry or she would kind of like get some distance from us because we were trying to destroy the dream, the life that she had built. She was imagining this beautiful man coming to Spain and spending time with her and finally living together. And there were no problems, you know, because what these scammers do is just. They mimic what you want to hear. They just say what you want to hear, kind of like what AI does. So there are no problems, no conflicts. You are always lovely and you are Listened all the time. It's the. The. The.
- [13:22]
E
This.
- [13:22]
D
That paragraph I read at the beginning, The. The idea of attention. So my mom resisted. She. She didn't want to hear the truth. And this is something I've encountered again and again with other victims. It's very hard to break the spell. So that led to some fights until. Brian, the name of the. The scammer, the American man told my mom he was going to send some gold bars, as in solid gold bars to our house. And, you know, when she told us that, my brother and I were like, there's no gold bars. They're like, gold bars are not coming to our house. That sounds. That sounds like a scam. So it required her evidence to convince her that this was a scam. And I traced the IP email address. I proved to her that he was talking to a man in Lagos, Nigeria, not in Syria. And thank God that I could do that. So she stopped talking to. To him.
- [14:17]
B
One of the things you. You're talking about getting to know some of these boys, and I'm thinking specifically of Biggie in this instance, who, as you got to know him, he really objected to being referred to as a scammer. Did your other subjects in Ecotoon, did they. Did they object to being called scammers as well?
- [14:33]
D
They had conflicting views. And I talk about this in the author's note. This is not an academic study on Roman scams, because obviously this. The. The. The subjects I managed to get to talk to me, they were a bit conflicted about what they were doing. And I think that might be one of the reasons why some of them wanted to talk to me, because it was a bit therapeutic talking to me for them. You know, they would tell me the kind of stuff they had done, and there was some remorse sometimes. There was also some. A bit of, like, bragging. And at the beginning, I struggled a lot understanding that because it was a bit disorienting. I was wondering whether that person felt bad or wanted to brag. And, you know, sometimes it was both.
- [15:20]
B
But I think some of your subjects are actually sort of developed feelings for some of the people that they are scamming. So are the. Are the Yahoo boys, in a sense, lonely as well? And are they somewhat addicted to this kind of communication as well?
- [15:35]
D
Yeah, I think that's an important question. And, you know, I spent hours and hours interviewing them. And not only interviewing them, but they gave me full access to the conversations with the victims. So that way I could see whether they were lying to me during interviews. And it's true that while we did interviews, you feel kind of like a romantic connection between the voice that is speaking and the victim. So in a way, sometimes I believe them. When they told me I feel for my victim, at the same time I was like, no, you don't. So I would call their bullshit sometimes. But at the same time, it's important to, to note that the environment these people are raised is very tough. So suddenly they, they, they, they are talking with someone in the west who has more opportunities, and their maybe sentimental life is more comfortable as well. So they talk about certain things. And these cameras would tell me I feel more comfortable talking to the victim about my life, even though that life has to be, like, disguised than talking to my friends. So it is very complex the way they develop feelings. And at the same time, you have their girlfriends, you know, because these people are scammers, but they also have a life and they have their girlfriends in nicotine in Lagos, feeling jealous of the victims. Because if you are scamming a woman in America and you might talk to her on the phone pretending to be a white man, and I've interviewed girlfriends in Lagos who tell me, I'm so pissed off whenever he's talking on the phone with, quote, unquote, his sweetheart.
- [17:23]
B
Why do you think we are starting to recognize loneliness as a global pandemic, if you will? And I hate to use that after Covid. And is it because of COVID Is it a global sickness also?
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D
I mean, definitely. Like, it's been reported that loneliness affects, like, the nervous system, and it might lead to early dementia or it might lead to making decisions that are just simply wrong and you cannot see reality. You are like, you go through a bout of loneliness. But it's just so clear to me that these victims and myself included, everyone, we are spending more and more time in kind of like golden cages designed by tech companies to make an enormous amount of profit while they are competing for our loved ones. You know, the more time we spend on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, less time we are spending with our people. So there might be a crisis of attention as well. There is a crisis of attention, and that's why that's where the Yahoo boys come up.
- [18:31]
C
I was interested, as I read, if there would be a difference between women as victims and men. And my thought was that women wanted companionship, they wanted sympathy, they wanted empathy, and the men wanted sex, and that that's the way you appeal to them. But I was fascinated by one quote one of your sources said to you Women, if you have their heart, you have their money. But white men pay fast, White women pay longer. That's a really interesting series of distinctions. What was your reaction when you heard that?
- [19:03]
D
Well, first of all, the first time I got there, I had the impression, and a lot of people believe this, that only women, that it's women who are scammed and men are not scammed. And you know why? That's because women are the only ones who come out and say, like my mom, I've been scammed. Then I got there and I discovered that actually maybe it was like 50, 50. And it also depended whether the scammer was more patient or not, as you say. With my mom, for example, they talked for more than a month, and he didn't ask her for any money because you have to win her heart before coming up with these preposterous idea that will make her send you money because she's already hooked. But with men, Aziz is a scamming man. Aziz is pretending to be a white woman. I think he stole the pictures from a porn actress. And he tries to get money very fast because he's asking for five, $10, $50. And white men in America, they are willing to send that amount of money for the promise that you will come as a woman maybe later today, and you will spend the night with them. I think that tells you something about what we are going through. Maybe it's a different kind of loneliness, you know, companionship, sex. But it's true that in some of the cases where Western men were being scammed, and some of these scams started through the illusion of getting sex, for example, you could also see that these men were very lonely and they also wanted companionship. For example, I started with the. The conversation of Biggie and Mark. I think it's Mark, Biggie is talking with a doctor in America who is making $40,000 a month, okay? And in Lagos, most people there maybe make $50 a month. So. So you. You see the difference. And Mark is, at the beginning, he's asking Biggie or the woman that Biggie is impersonating for videos of her. And it's quite funny because Biggie's asking for money for those videos, and you can go on the Internet and get those videos for free, but somehow he sends her money. But then later the conversation evolves and he's like, well, I live in these enormous house with five bedrooms. Why don't you come and stay here with your baby? And then you see a different kind of Mark. You see a guy who is Terribly lonely and he wants some companionship. So, yeah, it's, it's different, but at the same time it's quite similar.
- [21:36]
B
What do you think AI is going to do to the Yahoo boys industry?
- [21:41]
D
So I finished the reporting of this book maybe a year and a half and I was already seeing in Legos some of these Yahoo boys playing with AI I'm conflicted. I'm not sure the direction of romantic scams. One of the reasons is we already have romantic chatbots, right? You can have an AI girlfriend, you can have an AI boyfriend. And certainly AI is taking up like a chunk of the scammers business, but at the same time, it's gonna make scammers better because as Biggie could tell me, you know, how hard it is to remember 10 conversations at once if it's already hard to. To have girlfriend or boyfriend remember everything about their lives? You know, sometimes it happens to me with my own family. I cannot imagine what it is like with 10 boyfriends at the same time. So if you use AI if you use AI then it's. It's more dangerous because they can remember everything. They can perfection. They can improve their excuses.
- [22:42]
C
You did find a female scammer. I was wondering if there were any. And you found one. Was she successful? Did she use a different approach? What about her really struck you?
- [22:53]
D
Well, Charlie, you're right. From the beginning, I wanted to find female character because the book at the beginning was very masculine. And you know, that was not a problem per se, because if the criminal in the world is masculine, not the one who is gonna make it otherwise. So women there are smart and they think, what if rather than helping my boyfriend to get money from these dumb white American, I'm doing it on my own? So I knew there were some of them, but it took a while until I found Miracle. Miracle was sleeping with Biggie from time to time. And I found her just by chance. Biggie didn't tell me and Miracle. Suddenly one day I met her at a bar and she told me her story and she came to my apartment for a very long interview. And I'm gonna spare some of the darker details about her life because she started talking about her life. She had been trafficked and she had this horrible life before becoming a scammer that made her life really tragic. But at the same time, you could see that she was traumatized. And the way she reacted to everything that had happened to her life was by being the most reckless scammer you can encounter. And she could. She was scamming an American man in Kentucky as well, by the way. And she was also scamming women all across, around the world, Africa, Asia, Latin America, you name it. Women who wanted to adopt a baby. That was a kind of like the evolution of this scam. It was not romantic. She was doing both, but she was seeing that you could make more money from that.
- [24:36]
C
One of the things that you get to at the end of the book dismayed me, which is that some of these people, as they begin to realize their scams have run the course, resort to blackmail and start to blackmail their victims. And any person being scammed is even more vulnerable if they have sent compromising pictures of themselves to the scammer.
- [24:58]
D
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's how they, they, they do it. They tell them, I'm going to send these nudes, these pictures. You send me to your boss, to your wife, to your husband, to your kids. They are so embarrassing. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And again, if you are lonely and you're going through a bad period of your life, you might actually believe it.
- [25:16]
C
We'll interrupt Carlos for a moment. When we come back, we're going to ask him about two very specific and so sad cases of people in this country who really got hooked into these scams and did send a lot of money. And in one case, it's still sending money, apparently. Anyway, you'll hear about that after these words.
- [25:43]
E
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C
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- [26:41]
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- [27:02]
C
So we're going to rejoin Carlos, and we were very interested in getting some specific stories. I hope these are the worst case scenarios, but really, I think, Kate, they show just how seductive these kinds of scammers can be. And I don't mean that in a romantic sense. I just mean how they can draw you in, into conversation and then ask for money.
- [27:22]
B
Yeah, well, first of all, adoption scams to me are just. I mean, they're just evil because that's just a truly desperate person. Again, scamming is not morally excusable. But before you listen to these stories and think to yourself, oh, those fools. How could they possibly have sent money? How could they possibly have waited for somebody to show up more than once at their doorstep? I just ask you to remember that. I think one of the things that Carlos does brilliantly in this book is talks about loneliness as a pandemic. I mean, since COVID loneliness has just become, through the roof.
- [27:51]
C
Epidemic.
- [27:52]
B
An epidemic, exactly. And so I just ask you to remember that these people are who are just like you and me. They're just looking for companionship. And so they're not bumpkins. I don't think that was what Carlos was trying to say.
- [28:04]
C
So we asked him for two stories that he talks about in the book that I think are extraordinarily poignant. Here's the second part of our conversation with Carlos. I want you to tell me a couple of the stories that you highlight in the book, Chabuke and Teresa. And if I remember the story, he got $75,000 from her and she could least afford it. And 25 times over the years, he promised to come and visit her, but always had an excuse why he couldn't do it. And still she sent money. That is, to me, it's hard to believe, but they did form that kind of attachment. How do you explain that?
- [28:43]
D
You can't. I think one of the main takeaways I've taken from, like, following these people, these scammers, spending time with them, reading these conversations, seeing how lonely people in the west are. And I never contacted Theresa because the scam was still ongoing. I didn't because Chivuke was still talking to her. And I didn't want to get in the way because otherwise I would have stopped being a reporter and, you know, I would have changed reality. But it's just the core question of the book, right? How and why are these victims sending money to these boys when sometimes it's so obvious this is a scam. The way Theresa was scammed by Chilquet because she thought she was talking to a WWE fighter. The way it worked is that she sent him €300 the first time, the first payment. And the idea was that if she sent that money, she was going to meet him at some point. The way it works is that you keep coming up with different excuses that as you say it, ha. They have to become more and more wild, if I can put it like that. Because you know, okay, you might scam me once, twice, but what about like five times? What about 15 times? And what Tilke did was put more and more and more pressure on her. You know, she would. He would play with her feelings. And it is more dangerous because you are hijacking another person's mind. Like she would. She had developed such a strong feelings for him that she would do absolutely anything. And he was quite clever in the way he did his camp. He even pretended to be Cody Rhodes daughter on the phone with Theresa. So Theresa was completely living in a different world. She would talk on the phone with Chiguke thinking that she was talking with Cody Rhodes daughter. And Cody Rhodes daughter needed school material, needed food for so many different reasons. And with this, I finished this answer. You and I, we haven't met, Theresa. And our reaction, initial reaction is that's just impossible. It's preposterous. How come someone did that? And I agree. And I think that was the goal with the book, especially with the scammers and certainly with the victims. Like, try to understand why you, you say.
- [31:06]
C
You say he was posing as Cody Rhodes, who was a very successful professional wrest. So she could look him up and can tell that he had plenty of money himself. But still, still, even though she saw his picture and had to be suspicious that. That a wrestling champion would be wanting money from her, still she said it amazing. And I want to get to the other story, which is. Which is Richie and Trisha. And she got so deeply into it that she had to try to convey to him that she had killed herself. And that story really intrigued you. Tell me what you did.
- [31:45]
D
Okay, so one day I'm in Lagos, I'm interviewing Yahoo Boyce. And I need to know whether they are going to give me access. They are reliable. They are going to show me all the conversations. Because I cannot just rely on personal testimony. That's not enough for me. So I'm sitting down with this guy and then suddenly he tells me, oh yeah, Theresa, that woman, I scammed her two years and Then she died. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean? Basically, he told me that he thought this woman from Kentucky killed herself or had been killed by someone as a result of his scam. So he was telling me this, and you. I could see in his face he was deeply traumatized. Even though he was still scamming, he would say, I'm scamming men now. I'm not scamming women as a. As a way of saying, now it's better. So he gave me all the information about Trisa, and it was a bit weird because I couldn't find much information about her death online. So I had her address. I had a lot of stuff that he had gotten from her to scam her. And I decided to go to Kentucky to try to find more information. And I go to Kentucky and I find Theresa's house. And I'm very scared because, you know, there's these other character who was Theresa's husband. Theresa had a husband, so she was lonely, but she was in a marriage, which complicates things. And Richie would tell me, be careful. That guy's very dangerous. They. They. They fought a lot. And these. It was, I mean, hilarious, you know, these Nigerians camera being scared of an American man thousands of kilometers away. So I go to her house, I knock on her door, and I'm not gonna. I'm gonna give a bit of a spoiler, but I hope the readers can enjoy it on the page as well. I knock on the door, and who opens the door? And I'm excited, and I'm like, finally, I found you. You know, because spent thousand. Like, I spent weeks trying to find her. And she didn't take it very well, and she pulled out a gun. And there was this tense moment that readers might enjoy in the book. Anyway, I ended up talking to her, and I talk about this case when you ask me about Chibuque and Theresa, because if you hear the story of the scam between Richie and Treason, you would say exactly the same thing. How is it possible that she didn't know what was happening, especially if she was in a marriage? But then you hear Theresa's story, you hear she was a welder, she had an accident, her whole arm was broken, and she didn't get any compensation or, like, a small compensation. She was stuck at home, relationship was not good. The husband is not clear, but it's a bit abusive. So the situation is horrible. Then suddenly your understanding of this relationship changes a bit. And, you know, that was not my original intention as a reporter. And Writer. I wanted to go wherever the truth took me. But suddenly everything just became so complex and so difficult to grasp. I couldn't judge her.
- [35:02]
C
You've done a wonderful job of reporting, Carlos. It's a first of all from a very young man. I'm envious of what a great job you have done. I am older and young journalist. Inspire me in many cases. Nice job. Very nice job.
- [35:16]
D
Thank you. Thank you so much. It was a delightful conversation with you guys.
- [35:25]
C
Coincidentally, as we record this, I'm staying in Washington, D.C. with one of my old college roommates who 30 years ago was working in the Nigerian embassy. And among his other jobs was to take calls from people who said, you know, is this legitimate? I got these emails, et cetera, et cetera. And he had to tell them, you know, this is a scam and you're not going to get your money back if you're sending any.
- [35:46]
B
I think Carlos also does a nice job of how often this goes unreported. It's really hard to put an exact number of the cost between suicides, blackmail, what we're paying, what we're not reporting.
- [35:58]
C
Yeah, I think he was interesting in his saying that women were much more willing to report this than men, who I think felt terribly embarrassed. Anyway, we thank Carlos. It's an interesting book. The Yahoo Boys. We'll remind you of the people who make this podcast possible. And then of final word from Carlos. The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie is a joint production of Good Morning America and ABC Audio. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions, and our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make special mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kulberg, and Ariel Chester of ABC Good Morning America and Josh Cohan of ABC Audio. You can follow us and rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to find any of the books mentioned on this podcast, you can find them listed in the episode description.
- [36:48]
D
I think that I've realized writing this book how important journalism is at a time where newsrooms are shrinking. Because I've seen it with myself, I'm more willing to get to the other side of the story to understand their motivations. And I think we have to make an effort to fund journalism because the Internet has not bring us any closer. I hope we still find good journalism that makes the effort to understand other people's lives, because if not, it is a world that is ripe for demagogues and all sorts of bad people.
- [37:29]
H
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month, of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [37:51]
G
of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.