Cybercriminals (Yahoo Boys) and Society: Hustle Kingdoms, Occult Economies, and the Colonial Politics of Digital Fraud

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 while binding learners through spiritual oaths, psychological pressure, and economic dependency, complicating simple victim-offender binaries.Across compara