From Naira Marley to President Buhari, everyone has been talking about online fraud and how intertwined with Nigeria’s public image it has become. To be fair, this generalization around Yahoo Boys is one that we have earned, as many Nigerians, at home and in the diaspora engage in fraud, using a diverse spectrum of methods to find and fleece their targets. From Crude love scams that target lonely older citizens and have become so pseudo acceptable that shows like 90 Day Fiancee even feature ‘love stories’ like this, to account phishing where companies are tricked into wiring significant sums of money into dummy accounts, to the basic cold calling, where persons pretend to representatives of financial institutions to get important banking details from unsuspecting clients, we have seen it all. Or at least, we thought we had until this recent report from Twitter.

Our top priority is keeping people safe. In collaboration with law enforcement, industry peers, journalists, and expert researchers, we recently suspended a small network of accounts largely Tweeting in English and that presented themselves as based in the United States.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) March 12, 2020

These 71 removed accounts, operating out of Ghana and Nigeria and which we can reliably associate with Russia, attempted to sow discord by engaging in conversations about social issues, like race and civil rights.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) March 12, 2020

According to a thread shared by Twitter, it has been investigating the rise of bot accounts and account farms dedicated to spread fake news and false information around elections around the world. While the general consensus was that fake news bot farms were domiciled in Europe, its investigations brought to light fake news farms in Nigeria and Ghana using a cumulative 71 accounts set up to look American to share propaganda before the 2020 US elections.

This development suggests that Nigerian Yahoo Boys are expanding beyond advance fee fraud and love scams into political espionage. One has to worry, how long has this been happening, did Nigerian political espionage agents influence the 2019 Nigerian general elections, and what impact will they have in the 2023 general elections?

Are you worried, cos I am.

Edwin Okolo

Edwin Okolo is an author and journalist who has worked with YNaija, TheNativemag and the Naked Convos.