Typically, Yahoo Boy scammers message hundreds of people online while posing as members of the opposite sex using pictures stolen from social media profiles. They run all types of scams, but for those that involve blackmail, they often attempt to build up a relationship with their potential victim and obtain compromising information—most commonly, nude images. Then they shift gears.
“At some point, they reveal their identity after they get everything that they need, and then they start blackmailing,” Maimon says. They demand money and threaten to release images online or send them to family and friends if they’re not paid. “One of the approaches they use in order to make sure that the blackmail is realistic is actually producing those news clips that they send to the victims and in a way push them, nudge them, to pay the blackmail,” he says. “They try to push you to make decisions under conditions of stress, under conditions of urgency.”
Yahoo Boy fraudsters widely use social media platform Telegram as a way of organizing, chatting with each other, and as a marketplace where they sell knowledge and tutorials about how to operate different types of scams. The “news” videos seen by WIRED appear to include the details and images of real-world victims, although it was not possible to immediately verify the cases.
Brian Mason, a constable with the Edmonton Police Service in Canada who investigates fraud and works with the victims of scams, says he has seen cases where videos or screenshots of fake CNN broadcasts have been sent to victims. “It looks like your typical CNN broadcast,” Mason says. “It’s very, very convincing.” Mason says the approach has been utilized in sextortion scams, which commonly target teenagers and have been linked to a series of suicides.
Mason says he has seen incidents where the news clips falsely accuse scam victims of talking with underage females and that police are searching for them or have issued warrants for their arrest. “It makes the victim panic, because now they’re seeing themselves on this broadcast, and it’s a screen capture from when they were actually talking with the scammer from their own webcam,” Mason adds. The effect can potentially push the person into sending money or following demands from the scammers.
Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn tells WIRED that activities observed in the scammer channels are a violation of the app’s rules and suggested the company would take action against such channels.
“Content encouraging scamming is explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service,” Vaughn says. “Moderators empowered with custom AI and machine learning tools proactively monitor public parts of the platform and accept reports from users and organizations in order to remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day.”
Last year, Telegram removed more than a dozen Yahoo Boy channels after WIRED reported on their public activity; however, the scammers still have a presence on the platform and other social media platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube.
