Drugs, Deceit and Desperation: Inside the Twin Crisis Driving Nigerian Youth Into Cyber Fraud

In the sprawling urban centres of southwestern Nigeria, a quiet but corrosive convergence is taking shape between two of the country’s most pressing youth problems: psychoactive substance use and internet fraud, known locally as “Yahoo Yahoo.” A new qualitative study published in Discover Mental Health by researchers at Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital offers one of the most intimate portraits yet of how these behaviours intertwine, revealing not a simple cause-and-effect relationship but a complex, bidirectional web of peer pressure, economic desperation, cultural ambivalence and hidden psychological suffering.

The research team, led by Lateef Olutoyin Oluwole and Adetunji Obadeji of the Department of Psychiatry, conducted four focus group discussions with 22 young adults aged 18 to 47 who were receiving treatment for mental and behavioural disorders linked to psychoactive substance use. Seventeen of the participants were male and five female, with a mean age of just over 25 years. Most had tertiary education, a detail that punctures the stereotype of the fraudster as an uneducated dropout. Participants were identified through careful, ethically supervised clinical screening, and only those who had personally disclosed direct or vicarious involvement in internet fraud were included. Sessions lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and were analysed thematically using Braun and Clarke’s established six-step framework, with the research team continuing until data saturation was reached at the fourth discussion.

The scale of the underlying problem is staggering. Recent studies cited by the authors document lifetime psychoactive substance use among Nigerian university students reaching 86 percent, with regional prevalence rates of 44 percent for alcohol, 30 percent for tramadol, between 6 and 16 percent for cannabis, and 11 percent for codeine. More alarming still is the emergence of new psychoactive substances, including synthetic cannabinoids sold under street names such as “Wiz,” “Black Mamba” and “Colorado,” which are marketed through online platforms and local outlets with deceptive labelling and are associated with severe neuropsychiatric effects including psychosis and hallucinations. Against this backdrop, Nigeria’s demographic profile, in which individuals under 35 constitute more than 70 percent of the population, means that the intersection of drug use and cybercrime touches an enormous share of the nation’s future workforce.

What the focus groups revealed is that the relationship between substances and fraud operates through at least three distinct patterns. The first is functional linkage: substances used deliberately to enhance fraudulent performance. Participants described smoking synthetic cannabinoids to stay awake through long nights of online scamming, or using tramadol and cannabis to summon the confidence needed to manipulate victims. “When they use tramadol or loud, it gives them confidence to talk to clients online,” one participant explained. The second pattern is independence, where the two behaviours coexist without direct connection; many participants knew fraudsters who avoided drugs entirely, and drug users with no involvement in fraud. The third, and perhaps most destructive, is bidirectional reinforcement, in which fraud proceeds fund escalating substance use while substances sustain the emotional and physical capacity to continue defrauding victims.

Peer influence emerged as the most consistently cited driver across every discussion group. The researchers frame this through Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory, which holds that deviant behaviour is learned through intimate social interaction. Participants described acquiring not only the technical knowledge of fraud schemes but also the rationalisations that make them acceptable. “If your guy is doing Yahoo and you see him driving Benz, you go want join too,” one speaker said. Crucially, the authors found that peer influence now extends beyond face-to-face networks into mediated channels: Instagram displays of fraud-derived wealth create aspirational models that reach far beyond immediate friendship circles, effectively digitising the social transmission of deviance.

Beneath the peer dynamics lies a structural engine that the researchers interpret through Merton’s Strain Theory. When culturally prescribed goals, financial success, material display, social status, are pursued in a society where legitimate routes such as education and formal employment are systematically blocked, illegitimate pathways become rational choices for some. Participants spoke of poverty as the fundamental push factor and of intense family expectations, particularly on firstborn sons, to provide. “It’s poverty that is pushing them… they want to make it fast,” one participant said. The frustration of educated unemployment, the perception that the system has failed, and the visible rewards of fraud combined to produce what the authors describe as a maladaptive response to the disjuncture between aspiration and opportunity.

Perhaps the most unsettling finding concerns the family and community. Rather than uniformly condemning fraud, participants described a spectrum of parental responses ranging from unknowing enablement to active complicity. Some parents remained silent once money began flowing home; a few reportedly prayed for their sons’ success in fraud; others took their children to traditional healers, or babalawos, for spiritual “fortification” before fraudulent ventures. The authors argue that this cultural ambivalence, a system that simultaneously prohibits and enables, may be more consequential for youth behaviour than either clear condemnation or clear approval, because it creates exploitable ambiguity. Social media, pop culture and the visible material success of “big boys” reinforce the normalisation, with participants noting that fraud is now regarded in many communities as a normal job, morally softened by comparisons such as “not stealing with a gun.”

The biopsychosocial model completes the theoretical triad. Biologically, substances alter brain chemistry in ways that impair judgment and increase impulsivity, effects that may facilitate fraud. Psychologically, substances serve as self-medication for the distress arising from economic pressure, family conflict and the moral tensions of deceiving others. Socially, peer networks supply both the context for use and the normative framework for fraud. The authors stress that these frameworks are complementary rather than competing: strain theory explains the structural pressures, differential association explains how deviant responses are transmitted, and the biopsychosocial model explains how these forces manifest in individual experience.

Yet beneath the bravado and the Benz photographs, the study documents a hidden toll. Despite widespread normalisation, participants consistently reported guilt, remorse, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, intrusive thoughts about victims and difficulty forming trusting relationships. “Sometimes it’s hard to sleep, even after making money. The guilt is real,” one speaker admitted. Others described violence and depression when fraud ventures failed. This coexistence of external reward and internal distress, the authors note, complicates simplistic portrayals of “Yahoo boys” as simply immoral; even within deviant subcultures, individuals retain a moral awareness that carries real psychological cost, and young adults with mental health conditions appear significantly more vulnerable to new psychoactive substances, which in turn further impair judgment and increase susceptibility to fraudulent involvement.

The participants themselves offered a roadmap for intervention that the authors endorse: economic empowerment and job creation, parenting and family training programmes that replace punitive discipline with emotional connection, recreational and vocational initiatives, mental health support and mentorship, and faith-based moral reorientation. “If there are jobs or skills training, many won’t do Yahoo or drugs,” one participant said. The researchers caution that their sample, drawn from a single treatment facility in southwestern Nigeria, may limit generalisability, and that the clinical setting could have emphasised pathological aspects of participants’ experiences. Still, the consistency of narratives across groups lends weight to the central conclusion: substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths are not isolated acts of deviance but interconnected maladaptive coping strategies within contexts of structural inequality, demanding integrated, youth-focused responses that address mental health, family dynamics and economic opportunity together rather than treating either crisis alone.

Subject of Research: The psychosocial and cultural drivers linking psychoactive substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths

Article Title: Psychosocial and cultural dynamics shaping substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths

Article References: Oluwole, L. O., Obadeji, A., Ajiboye, A. S., & Atofarati, M. A. (2026). Psychosocial and cultural dynamics shaping substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths. Discover Mental Health, 6(1), Article 178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00476-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00476-7

Keywords: substance use, internet fraud, Yahoo Yahoo, Nigeria, youth, cybercrime, mental health, peer influence, strain theory, new psychoactive substances, qualitative research, cultural normalisation