Umar Sadiq

When I was living in Beckley Estate, I had this neighbour, "Kay Wire", who was a Yahoo boy but had been experiencing a payout drought for two years. I think his niche was Wire Wire. On Christmas Eve in 2019, he received an email notification containing financial advice about a transaction he had been monitoring for over six months. He contacted a friend to give him his client's payment info. After agreeing on the terms, he provided the account details as requested. In less than two hours, he received a payment slip confirming a transfer of $87,000. Engulfed with excitement, he called his car dealer to arrange for a Toyota Venza where he would be coming make payment in three days after receiving payments. He also contacted the agent who had helped him secure his apartment and asked him to find a landed property. They eventually found one on Olaniyi Street for ₦16 million. On the day he expected to receive his money, he waited for his friend's call, but nothing came. He called repeatedly without getting a response. At around 10 p.m., he went to his friend's place in Egbeda, only to discover that he wasn't at home. That was when reality began to dawn on him. He waited until the following day, but there was still no response. He put a call to someone who knew his friend and learnt that the friend had posted WhatsApp updates showing himself taking an Uber to Ikeja while heading to the airport, from where he flew to Ghana. Obviously, he had restricted my neighbour from viewing his WhatsApp updates. Two years later, my neighbour came across a graduation video of this same friend, shared by their mutual friend, showing him graduating from a UK university in Birmingham, with a master's degree. He has lost it all, and already taking alcohol to irresponsibly just to ease depression. In 2024, I took my neighbour to a bar on Charity Road, Abule Egba. While we were on a few bottles lay flat, I advised him without fear to abandon illegality and focus on building a legitimate career. When I asked what he wanted to do with his life, he said he wanted to return to school. I told him he could relocate abroad without needing too many funds on hand, only if he was willing to sit for the necessary examinations. I registered him for GRE, which he took and performed exceptionally well in, scoring 310 out of 340. Thereafter, I helped him send cold email to a few schools and paid for his application fee to three different Universities, he secured a fully funded scholarship to study at a university in Arkansas, USA. During one of his shopping trips to Costco, a Grocery store, he ran into the same guy who had ripped him off years earlier in Nigeria. By this time, the guy had also relocated to the United States. Immediately he recognised my neighbour, he went straight down on his knees and apologised for what had happened. My neighbour told me that the guy drove to Costco in a Cybertruck. In January 2026, after my neighbour completed his master's degree in the US, this same guy he once had a terrible experience with helped him secure a job. Today, they both work with NVIDIA, where my former neighbour now earns $23,000 monthly as a Deep Learning Engineer. Fast-forward to August, and he now owns a house inside the same Beckley Estate where he once struggled to pay his rent and utility bills. The last time we spoke, he told me how far he believed he could have gone in life if not for internet fraud. According to him, it had set him back in many areas of achievement, and he only began making meaningful progress after securing a scholarship to further his education. The truth is, many Yahoo boys on the streets have one or two untapped potentials, but some need an enabling environment to bring those potentials to life. Sometimes, what looks like a lack of ability is actually a lack of opportunity and the right environment.