In October 2008, Colin Powell, a former United States Secretary of State, four-star general, the man who stood before the United Nations to make the case for invading Iraq; climbed onto a stage at the Africa Rising Festival in London and did the Yahooze dance.
He swayed. He smiled. He moved his shoulders to the beat while Olu Maintain, the Nigerian artist behind the song, performed beside him. The crowd cheered. Cameras flashed. Headlines followed: "He traded statecraft for stagecraft," wrote Foreign Policy.
It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated joy, a celebration of African music on a global stage, endorsed by one of the most recognizable Black men in the world.
There was just one problem.
"Yahooze" wasn't just a party anthem. It was, depending on who you asked, either a clever double entendre or an open celebration of internet fraud. The song's chorus—"I go hammer, I go Hummer"—wasn't about construction tools or military vehicles. "Hammer" is Nigerian slang for hitting it big, usually through questionable means. The Hummer was what you bought after you'd "hammered" someone's bank account from an internet café in Festac.
Colin Powell almost certainly didn't know this at the time. Most people outside Nigeria didn't. But every young person in Lagos likely understood exactly what Olu Maintain was singing about. And they loved it.
This is the story of how fraud became a genre.
The economics of desperation
To understand why scam culture and music became so intertwined in Ghana and Nigeria, you have to understand what happened in the 1980s.
Nigeria was riding high on oil money. The petrodollars were flowing. Then the bottom fell out. Global oil prices collapsed, and with them, Nigeria's economy. The country that had been dreaming of becoming Africa's superpower suddenly couldn't pay civil servants. Unemployment skyrocketed. A generation of educated young people; English-speaking, literate, ambitious; found themselves with degrees and no jobs, skills and no opportunities, dreams and no legitimate path to achieving them.
Ghana's story was similar. Structural adjustment programs gutted public services. The cedi crumbled. Young people who'd been promised that education was the ticket to prosperity discovered that the ticket led nowhere.
Into this vacuum stepped the 419 scam. The name comes from Section 419 of Nigeria's Criminal Code, which criminalizes fraud.
The scams themselves are older than the internet—they started with letters, then faxes, then emails. The format was almost always the same: a desperate plea from a Nigerian prince, a government official, a widow of a deposed dictator. They needed your help moving money out of the country. In exchange, you'd get a percentage. All you had to do was send a small fee upfront.
It sounds absurd now. But people fell for it. Thousands of them. Millions of dollars disappeared into Lagos bank accounts.
By the time the internet arrived in the late 1990s, the infrastructure for fraud was already in place. What the internet did was scale it. Suddenly, you didn't need to buy stamps or pay for international faxes. You could email ten thousand people in an afternoon. The math changed. Even if only one in a thousand people responded, that was ten potential victims per batch.
The Yahoo Boys were born.
Yahoo Boys and Sakawa Boys
In Nigeria, they called themselves Yahoo Boys—named after the Yahoo email accounts they used to run their scams. In Ghana, the term was Sakawa, a Hausa word meaning "to put inside" or, more loosely, "how to make money."
But Sakawa was always more than just a synonym for internet fraud. From the beginning, it carried a spiritual dimension that set Ghanaian scam culture apart.
The theory, if you can call it that, goes something like this: the internet is a realm of invisible forces. Money moves through wires and satellites, appearing and disappearing like magic. If technology operates on principles most people don't understand, why couldn't other invisible forces—spiritual ones—be harnessed alongside it? If you're already manipulating someone through a screen, why not also manipulate them through juju?
So Sakawa boys began visiting traditional priests. They performed rituals. They made sacrifices. They followed instructions that ranged from the merely strange (sleeping in coffins, bathing in specific rivers at specific times) to the genuinely disturbing (reports of animal sacrifices, and darker rumors that most people don't want to verify).
The priests adapted. Just as they'd always offered charms for success in business or love, they now offered charms for success in romance scams. The spiritual and the technological merged into something new: a kind of cyber-juju, a techno-spiritualism that treated fraud as just another arena where supernatural intervention could tip the scales.
Whether any of it actually worked is beside the point. What matters is that people believed it worked. And that belief created a culture—complete with its own rituals, its own hierarchies, its own codes of conduct.
And, eventually, its own soundtrack.
When Hip-Hop met the hustle
Hip-hop has always had a complicated relationship with crime. From Biggie's crack-dealing origin story to Jay-Z's Marcy Projects mythology to the entire drill genre, rappers have long drawn on their proximity to illegal activity as a source of authenticity. Crime pays, but rapping about crime pays better.
Nigerian hip-hop followed the same playbook, but with a local twist.
When Olu Maintain released "Yahooze" in 2007, he tapped into something that was already bubbling beneath the surface. The song didn't invent the connection between music and fraud—it just brought it into the open.
Here was a mainstream artist, with mainstream production values and a mainstream audience, making music that everyone understood was about internet scamming.
The song won Song of the Year at the Headies, Nigeria's equivalent of the Grammys.
What followed was a flood. Artists realized there was an audience hungry for music that reflected what was actually happening on the streets—not the sanitized version of Nigerian life that parents wanted to project, but the reality of young men making money through laptops and lies.
Some songs were explicit. "Maga No Need Pay," a 2007 collaboration featuring multiple artists, was essentially an instruction manual set to music. ("Maga" is slang for a scam victim—someone gullible enough to be fooled.) Others were more subtle, using code words and slang that outsiders wouldn't recognize but insiders understood perfectly.
The themes were consistent: luxury cars, expensive phones (always iPhones, always the latest model), designer clothes, bottles of champagne in the club. The message was clear—this is what success looks like, and this is how you get there.
Birds of a feather
Research by Dr. Suleman Lazarus, who studied 18 Nigerian hip-hop artists and their lyrics about cybercrime, found that the relationship between musicians and Yahoo Boys was more than just cultural; it was often financial and personal.
Some artists had direct ties to the fraud economy. Dammy Krane, a popular singer, was arrested in Miami for cyber fraud in 2017. Naira Marley, one of the biggest names in Nigerian music, was detained by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on fraud allegations in 2019. Sauce Kid, a Nigerian rapper, was apprehended in the United States for online scams.
But even artists who weren't directly involved benefited from fraud money. Yahoo Boys became patrons of the arts, setting up record labels and financing music projects. A young artist with talent but no connections could find a benefactor willing to fund studio time, music videos, and promotion—as long as they didn't ask too many questions about where the money came from.
"A lot of fraud money has definitely gone into our music," one industry insider told Al Jazeera, "from people who wanted to genuinely clean up their acts to people who really loved the music and needed to do something to get themselves out there."
The result was a symbiotic relationship. Musicians got funding and street credibility. Fraudsters got cultural legitimacy and a way to launder both their money and their reputation. The lines between artist and criminal blurred until, in some cases, they disappeared entirely.
The moral framework
One of the most striking aspects of fraud culture—in both its musical expression and its real-world practice—is the elaborate moral justification that surrounds it.
Yahoo Boys and Sakawa Boys don't think of themselves as criminals. Or rather, they don't think of themselves as the bad kind of criminals. In their telling, they're something closer to Robin Hood figures, reclaiming wealth that was stolen from Africa through centuries of exploitation.
""If we can't go to America, we will take money from the Americans.""
The logic goes something like this: Europeans colonized Africa, extracted its resources, enslaved its people, and built their wealth on African suffering. The current global economic system continues this exploitation through unfair trade practices, predatory lending, and visa policies that trap Africans in poverty while allowing Westerners to move freely. If a young man in Accra or Lagos can't get a visa to pursue opportunities abroad, why shouldn't he "take money from the Americans" instead?
"If we can't go to America, we will take money from the Americans."
This framing appears constantly in hip-hop lyrics. Victims are portrayed not as innocent people being robbed, but as greedy marks who deserve what they get. The term "maga" itself carries a connotation of foolishness—someone so blinded by the promise of easy money that they ignore obvious warning signs. In this telling, the scammer isn't exploiting the victim; the victim's own greed is exploiting them.
It's a moral sleight of hand, but it's effective. It allows young men to engage in fraud while maintaining their self-image as decent people. It transforms a crime into a political act, a form of resistance against an unjust global order.
The music reinforces this framework. Songs don't just celebrate the lifestyle that fraud enables; they provide the vocabulary and logic that makes fraud feel acceptable. They offer what sociologists call "techniques of neutralization"—ways of thinking about harmful behavior that minimize guilt and responsibility.
The Ghana variation
While Nigerian Yahoo Boys and Ghanaian Sakawa Boys share many characteristics, the Ghanaian version has its own distinct flavor—and its own relationship with music and culture.
Sakawa emerged from predominantly Muslim communities in Accra—Nima, Mamobi, Accra New Town. It evolved from the penpal culture that flourished as Ghana encouraged internet adoption in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As internet cafés spread, so did the scams.
But what really set Sakawa apart was its integration with traditional spiritualism. By 2007, the fusion of internet fraud and juju rituals had become so common that it defined the entire subculture. Sakawa boys weren't just scammers; they were practitioners of a kind of occult-tech hybrid that fascinated and horrified mainstream Ghanaian society.
This spiritual dimension made its way into music and movies. Ghanaian films depicting the Sakawa lifestyle became enormously popular, featuring dramatic scenes of rituals and supernatural bargains. The message was often cautionary—Sakawa leads to destruction, the spirits always demand more than you're willing to give—but the films also portrayed the lifestyle with a kind of lurid fascination that made them as much advertisement as warning.
The fashion followed. Sakawa boys developed a distinctive style: flashy clothes, expensive watches, foreign cars with custom plates. They became visible in nightclubs and on social media, flaunting wealth that everyone understood came from somewhere illegitimate. The very act of flaunting was part of the culture—a recruitment tool, a status symbol, and a middle finger to a society that had failed to provide legitimate paths to success.
Music soundtracked all of it. Ghanaian artists produced tracks that referenced the lifestyle, the money, the spiritual practices. The culture developed its own slang, its own codes, its own internal hierarchies—all of which found expression in lyrics that insiders understood and outsiders could dance to without comprehension.
The training academies
In recent years, the fraud economy has become increasingly institutionalized. What started as individual hustlers teaching themselves through trial and error has evolved into something more organized: "hustle kingdoms" or "HK"—informal academies that train new recruits in the art of the scam.
These training centers operate both online and offline. Senior fraudsters—"chairmen"—recruit younger apprentices and teach them everything from social engineering techniques to the technical details of business email compromise. The apprentices learn how to create convincing fake identities, how to research potential victims, how to build emotional connections over weeks or months before making the ask.
The academies have historical precedent. In the 1980s and 1990s, similar setups existed under the name "business centres." A chairman would rent an office, hire a secretary, and recruit junior scammers to target victims via postal letters, telephone calls, and faxes. The internet didn't create this infrastructure; it just gave it new tools.
What's changed is the scale and sophistication. Today's fraud operations can be genuinely impressive from a technical standpoint. Business email compromise attacks—where scammers impersonate executives to trick employees into wiring money—require detailed research, careful timing, and convincing impersonation. Some operations rival legitimate businesses in their organizational complexity.
And the music continues to chronicle it all. Recent songs reference not just the lifestyle outcomes of successful fraud, but the process itself—the long nights, the careful cultivation of victims, the moment when the money finally hits the account.
The victims nobody talks about
Here's the part that the music never mentions: the victims.
Not the "magas" who get taken for thousands or millions of dollars—though their suffering is real enough. The other victims. The Ghanaians and Nigerians who have nothing to do with fraud but bear the consequences of their countries' reputations.
Because of Sakawa and Yahoo Boys, Ghanaians and Nigerians face discrimination in the global digital economy. Payment processors block transactions from West African IP addresses. Dating websites ban users from these countries entirely. Legitimate businesses struggle to find international partners willing to work with them.
The reputation damage is enormous and ongoing. Every headline about a fraud ring busted, every documentary about Sakawa boys, every viral story about a romance scam—it all reinforces a narrative that makes life harder for the vast majority of Ghanaians and Nigerians who are just trying to make an honest living.
And then there are the victims within the fraud economy itself. The young men who get caught and face prison time, their futures destroyed. The ones who go too deep into the spiritual practices and emerge damaged in ways that are hard to articulate. The families torn apart by money that came too easily and disappeared just as fast.
The music doesn't talk about them. The movies show the cautionary tales but can't resist making them glamorous. The culture celebrates the winners and ignores everyone else.
Where we are now
In 2026, the relationship between fraud and music in Ghana and Nigeria is more complex than ever.
On one hand, there have been high-profile crackdowns. The extradition of major players to the United States has sent shockwaves through the fraud community. Social media is full of stories about "Sakawa chairmen" arrested, luxury cars seized, lavish lifestyles brought to sudden ends.
On the other hand, the economic conditions that created the fraud economy haven't changed. Youth unemployment remains catastrophic. The gap between aspiration and opportunity remains vast. The internet continues to offer what looks like a shortcut to the good life.
And in Ghana, the new wave of artists under the Asakaa umbrella have been more direct—and more complicated—in their relationship with hustle culture.
The Asakaa Boys—Jay Bahd, O'Kenneth, Reggie, Kwaku DMC, City Boy, and their collective—emerged from Kumasi in 2020 with a sound built on UK drill beats, Twi slang spoken backwards, and lyrics that center the hustle above all else. Songs like "Condemn," "Akatafoc," and "Sore" don't dance around the subject. They're "blunt lifestyle declarations," as one critic put it: hustle, hustle, and more hustle.
The language is coded—asakaa itself is "kasa" (to talk) reversed—designed so insiders understand what outsiders miss.
Whether the Asakaa sound explicitly references Sakawa is a matter of interpretation. The artists themselves push back against direct associations, insisting their music is about struggle, brotherhood, and making it out of Kumasi's tougher neighborhoods. "We don't need to preach about fights, we don't need to preach about knives," Yaw Tog told Rolling Stone. "Just unity."
But the imagery tells its own story: designer streetwear, overnight wealth, cryptic references to "hunters" and "trappers." The lifestyle they document exists in the same ecosystem that Sakawa boys inhabit—sometimes overlapping, sometimes adjacent, always aware of each other.
The diaspora has taken things further.
In the UK and US, artists of Ghanaian and Nigerian descent have made fraud culture an explicit genre. G4 Boyz—Staten Island brothers of Nigerian and Ghanaian heritage—coined the term "scam rap" and built their career on it. Their 2020 hit "Local Scammer" featuring UK-based G4 Choppa became an anthem, with lyrics that read like a tutorial: "Insert card, I'm online / Sufficient funds in the swipe / African boy, that's me / I can be your local casher / Switch it, I can be your local scammer." They followed it up with "Scamming in London," "Ghana Girl," and an EP literally titled S.C.A.M.—an acronym for "Still Chasing After Money."
"Insert card, I'm online / Sufficient funds in the swipe / African boy, that's me / I can be your local casher / Switch it, I can be your local scammer."
NSG, the East London collective of Ghanaian and Nigerian descent, operates in a different register—more celebration than confession—but their rise tracks alongside the same cultural moment. Their 2023 album Area Boyz reclaimed a term that typically carries negative connotations in West Africa, flipping it into an identity marker. "We channeled the negativity from the areas we grew up, the stereotypes around us, but we made something out of it," member Kruddz told interviewers. They've opened a bar in Ghana, performed to sold-out crowds, and built a bridge between London and Accra. But the bridge runs both ways, carrying money, culture, and all the complications that come with both.
The Grammys noticed. In their recent expansion of African music categories, Ghana drill—Asakaa—received specific recognition, a validation that the sound has transcended its origins. "The Grammys just recognized asakaa which means it's getting bigger," Reggie told Pan African Music. "Nigeria has started doing drill music too and that was inspired by asakaa. Other countries in Africa like Kenya have also been influenced by us."
What this means for the relationship between fraud culture and music is still unfolding. The Asakaa artists insist they're telling stories of legitimate struggle. The G4 Boyz make no such claims—their music is explicitly, unapologetically about the scam life. NSG occupies a middle ground, embracing the "area boy" identity while building legitimate businesses. Each represents a different way of processing the same underlying reality: young West Africans, at home and abroad, navigating economies that often feel rigged against them.
The codes have evolved. The slang has updated. The production has gotten slicker. But the fundamental tension remains—between aspiration and access, between what the world promises and what it delivers, between making it and making it out. The new generation has inherited both the hustle and the soundtrack.
And the music keeps playing.
Recent research examining 33 Nigerian hip-hop songs released between 2017 and 2023 found that the themes remain consistent: glamorization of fraud, dehumanization of victims, justification through colonial grievance narratives. The supernatural dimension has grown more prominent, with lyrics referencing the rituals and spiritual practices that supposedly guarantee success.
The artists keep getting bigger. Nigerian music—Afrobeats, Afropop, whatever you want to call it—has become a global phenomenon. Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido fill arenas from London to Los Angeles. The sound that emerged from the same streets that produced Yahoo Boys now dominates streaming platforms worldwide.
Most of these successful artists have no connection to fraud. But the genre they work in was shaped, funded, and influenced by a culture that grew up alongside internet scamming. The two phenomena developed together, fed each other, and remain intertwined in ways that are impossible to fully untangle.
What this means
So what do we make of all this?
The easy response is moral condemnation. Fraud is wrong. The victims suffer real harm. The cultural glorification of crime is dangerous. All of this is true.
But the easy response also misses something important.
The fraud economy didn't emerge from nowhere. It emerged from economic collapse, from structural adjustment, from a global system that extracted wealth from Africa for centuries and then blamed Africans for being poor. It emerged from visa regimes that trap talented young people in countries with no opportunities, while allowing capital to flow freely across borders. It emerged from a world that told African youth to dream big while systematically denying them the means to achieve those dreams legitimately.
None of this justifies fraud. But it explains it. And explanation matters because without understanding how we got here, we can't figure out how to get somewhere better.
The music, for all its moral complications, is a document. It tells us what young people in Ghana and Nigeria were thinking and feeling during a specific historical moment. It captures the frustration, the ambition, the moral compromises, and the desperate creativity of a generation trying to find a way forward in impossible circumstances.
That doesn't make it admirable. But it makes it worth understanding.
There's a line from that research on Nigerian hip-hop that stuck with me: "Yahoo Boys, therefore, represent reflections of society."
Not aberrations. Not outliers. Reflections.
The fraud economy reflects the failures of the legitimate economy. The music reflects the values that society actually rewards, regardless of what it claims to value. The glorification of quick wealth reflects a world where patience and hard work increasingly feel like sucker's games.
If you want to change the music, you have to change the reality it reflects. You have to create economies where talent leads to opportunity, where education leads to employment, where young people can see a path to the good life that doesn't require them to compromise their integrity.
That's a much harder problem than condemning hip-hop lyrics.
In the meantime, the beat goes on. The songs keep dropping. Young men in Accra and Lagos keep dreaming of hammering, of Hummers, of a life that looks like the music videos. Some of them will make it. Most of them won't. And the culture will continue to document it all—the winners, the losers, and everyone caught in between.
Colin Powell is dead now. The Africa Rising Festival is a distant memory. But somewhere in West Africa, a young man is listening to the descendants of "Yahooze" and making plans as the soundtrack of the hustle plays on.
