One Nigerian scammer built what Carlos Barragán calls a "small fortune" by pretending to be WWE star Cody Rhodes. Barragán recounts the episode in an excerpt from his book The Yahoo Boys, published in WIRED Book Club, which places the impostor in Ikotun, a neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria. The fraud depended on patient relationship-building: slow, sustained romance fraud that persuaded at least one long-term target to send repeated payments. The case illustrates how some Nigerian fraud networks have shifted from quick hustles to high-yield social engineering.

He moved from quick hustles to patient, months-long romance cons. That contrast is the point Barragán makes in the excerpt: the subject, given the pseudonym Chibuike, began with small, one-off payments and street-level schemes before settling on impersonating a celebrity to extract ongoing sums from a trusting romantic partner.

Choosing a celebrity and keeping the story straight

Chibuike picked Cody Rhodes because he already knew the wrestler's biography and watched matches closely, Barragán writes. That familiarity let him avoid obvious conflicts when a victim checked Rhodes's public schedule. He monitored live bouts and online appearances so the invented messages and calls wouldn't contradict what was publicly visible about the real wrestler. The excerpt presents this diligence as the operational detail that made the impersonation workable.

The tools were ordinary digital tools: social media for reconnaissance, dating platforms and messaging apps for contact, and falsified media and biographies to sustain the persona. But the work was not automated spam. It was careful social engineering. Barragán describes how Chibuike matched his communications to Rhodes's appearances so that a victim who glanced at a match or an interview would find nothing obvious to disprove the story.

From clubs in Ikotun to an online con career

Barragán places the subject in Ikotun, where nights dancing in local clubs and an unreliable income pushed him toward fraud. He learned the basics informally, listening to peers and street conversations about techniques the excerpt calls "formats" and "billings." Early failures taught him that quick promises often yielded nothing. "I was always getting promises," Chibuike remembered in the excerpt, referring to victims who said they would send money and then did not.

Mastheads

That frustration, Barragán reports, nudged him toward a slower method: cultivating intimacy over weeks and months, then monetizing the relationship. Where a one-off payment might bring a small return, a sustained romance could produce much larger, repeated transfers.

In this case, Barragán writes, the impostor persuaded at least one long-term romantic target to send money over time, an effort he describes as accumulating a "small fortune."

Barragán frames the episode as part of a broader shift among so-called Yahoo Boys, a loose network of Nigerian fraudsters. The excerpt argues that the group has evolved from mass-produced, easily detected scams into patient, high-yield operations that trade volume for quality of deception. The move matters because it raises the cost of detection and increases the emotional damage to victims who believed they were in a genuine relationship.

The choice to impersonate a WWE performer was strategic. Celebrity identities carry instant credibility among fans and offer cover: a public figure's schedule and media appearances supply predictable touchpoints the impostor can mimic.

Barragán emphasizes that cultural familiarity helped Chibuike sustain the fraud. Knowing Rhodes's backstory and watching matches closely allowed him to answer questions without tripping over verifiable details.

The excerpt doesn't list a total dollar amount, nor does it name the victim. It focuses instead on technique and motive: how patient deception, local knowledge, and attention to public information turned a street-level hustler into someone who could run a months-long romance.

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Barragán closes the chapter by stressing the impostor's diligence in matching messages to the wrestler's public appearances.

This article was created with AI assistance.