'Hustle kingdoms' How west Africa became a hotbed of online blackmail

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as internet connectivity began penetrating west Africa, young people soon realised that individuals in North-America and Europe with access to more money than them and potentially susceptible to blackmail were now reachable by the click of a button.

- Eromo Egbejule

Along came the "Nigerian prince" letters, a famous scamming technique employed by online fraudsters - known as Yahoo Boys in Nigeria, Sakawa Boys in Ghana and Les Brouteurs in Ivory Coast - preying on unsuspecting targets across the web. The emails typically involved someone pretending to be Nigerian royalty, a claim so outlandish that victims presumed it couldn't be a lie.

On and off school campuses, cyber cafes were the only way for the majority of the population to surf the internet. Young men saved or borrowed to "buy time" as ticket slips were called, to quickly tweak letter templates and send to mass recipients, hoping for a lucky break given stark unemployment levels in Nigeria.

As telecommunications companies reduced data subscription prices and security personnel began hunting letterwriters, more scammers invested in home-based connections and pivoted to newer techniques - targeting elderly foreigners, cryptocurrency scams, business compromise emails, catfish romance scams and online Ponzi schemes to boost success rates.

Then came the fast-growing scam of sextortion: blackmailing people for money after obtaining sexual footage of them.