Bukola Adebayo. Staflex pictured by his laptop in Accra, Ghana on June 14, Poverty and unemployment are driving Ghana's youth into the dark underbelly of identity theft and romance scams. But the 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.
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 Starflex is posing as Joan, a year-old masters' student from Turkey, while chatting with an American realtor he befriended on online dating site Zoosk. When he cashes the money through his crypto wallet in Ghana, Starflex said he shares the proceeds with his crew of keyboard warriors running shifts to keep the web of lies.
Both said economic hardship forced them to fend for themselves as teenagers and turn to scamming. When his father became sick following a stroke, and his mother, a petty trader, could no longer put food on the table, Suleiman said Starflex introduced him to the criminal trade.
