Faced with poverty and unemployment, young Ghanaian men are turning to online romance frauds

As a teenager, Kasim was the star striker of his school’s football team in Ghana, earning him the moniker Starflex. But the 22-year-old has since abandoned both his studies and football for a vocation that keeps him up at night: finding and luring victims into online romance scams.

In one bedroom in Accra, Starflex and his two friends Suleiman, 19, and Patrick, 18, huddle over their phones and laptops, exchanging intimate messages with “pals”, their code name for potential victims they meet on dating sites.

To bait a suitor, they comb Facebook and Instagram, swiping photos of influencers, actresses and adult film actors to create fake accounts on dating sites.

“We use photos or videos of you shopping, cooking or hanging out with friends to keep up the format,” Starflex told Context, referring to their playbook to trap and defraud victims globally.

Starflex and his sidekicks are known as the Sakawa boys – meaning “putting inside” in the Hausa language, a young generation of school drops-outs in Ghana who dabble in identity theft and romance scams on social media.

Their activities can be traced to the Yahoo boys, or fraudsters in Nigeria. Ghana’s Cyber Security Authority estimates victims have lost 49.5 million Ghanaian cedi ($4.5 million) to identity theft schemes since the beginning...

Read more