The study, authored by legal scholar Boris Awa, examines how Law No. 2010/012 of 21 December 2010 on Cybersecurity and Cybercrime, known as the Cyber-law, has fared in practice. Adopted to fill a legal vacuum created by rapid technological change, the law criminalizes a comprehensive range of digital offences modeled on the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime. These include unauthorized interception of communication networks, disruption of information systems, fraudulent access to networks, misuse of personal data, publication of intimate images, and child pornography. The statute was meant to guarantee access to justice in an era when the internet had become the primary vector for criminal activity. Yet the study’s central finding is that, from a litany of judicial decisions examined, the courts continue to apply ordinary penal code offences when determining cybercrime charges.

The scale of the problem is considerable. Crypto scams alone account for more than 54 percent of cybercrime in Cameroon, with damages estimated at over two million US dollars in 2023, and no comprehensive data exists on the full scale of the various cybercrimes committed in the country. INTERPOL’s African Cyberthreat Assessment Report identifies online scams, digital extortion, business email compromise, botnets and ransomware as the driving forces behind cyberthreats across the continent. Against this backdrop, the gap between the specialized law on the books and the law applied in courtrooms has real consequences for victims, defendants and the credibility of the justice system itself.

The research rests on a qualitative, doctrinal methodology grounded in primary and secondary sources, including legislation, constitutional provisions and case law obtained from three trial courts: the Court of First Instance Bonanjo in the economic capital Douala, the Court of First Instance Bamenda in the North West Region, and the Buea Court of First Instance in the South West Region. This selection allowed a comparative view across Cameroon’s French-speaking civil law and English-speaking common law traditions, a dual legal heritage enshrined in Article 68 of the Constitution. The author acknowledges that judgments from seven other regions could not be examined due to financial and logistical constraints, so the analysis does not purport to be exhaustive, but the selected courts carry significant caseloads and offer a credible window into contemporary judicial practice.

The case studies are revealing. In the 2024 Tresor case, an employee of a company partnering with MTN Cameroon used his professional credentials to reset a customer’s mobile money PIN and withdrew 3,200,000 CFA francs, roughly 3,100 US dollars, from the complainant’s account. The court convicted him of simple theft under section 318 of the Penal Code and imposed a five-month prison term, suspended for one year. The study argues that the proper charge was hacking under section 65 of the Cyber-law, which punishes unauthorized access to an electronic communication network. Similarly, in the 2021 Joly case, an administrator of a WhatsApp group used for currency trading was convicted of theft by false pretence after failing to deliver currency worth 399,000 CFA francs, receiving a three-year sentence suspended for three years, when the study contends the sanction should have been sourced from the electronic commerce legislation. In a third case, an advance fee fraud conducted entirely by telephone and Western Union transfers was again prosecuted as ordinary false pretence rather than under the Cyber-law.

The consequences of this reliance on ordinary law are structural, not merely cosmetic. Under the Penal Code, judges enjoy broad discretion to grant mitigating circumstances and suspended sentences, and in practice most cybercriminals either serve no imprisonment or receive markedly lighter penalties. The Cyber-law, by contrast, expressly forbids suspended sentences for the offences it defines, and the study argues that mitigating circumstances cannot apply because they are not formally provided for in the statute, in line with the principle of legality. Moreover, key Penal Code concepts translate poorly to the digital realm: aggravated theft requires material elements such as force, weapons, breaking in, climbing in or the use of a false key or motor vehicle, none of which corresponds to the mechanics of a cyber intrusion. The result is that offences which the Cyber-law treats as serious crimes, some punishable by more than twenty years of imprisonment, are reduced to misdemeanours or simple offences under ordinary law, a leniency the study warns may itself encourage the culture of committing cybercrime.

Evidence is the other half of the problem. The Criminal Procedure Code of 2005 admits electronic proof only tacitly and narrowly, through provisions on wiretapping and electronic listening devices that the Court of Appeal in the Tchoffo Jonas case interpreted as investigative tools for capturing live communications, not as a framework for authenticating stored digital data. The Cyber-law contains its own procedural rules, empowering criminal investigation officers and sworn officials of the National Agency for Information and Communication Technologies, ANTIC, to conduct searches and seizures of electronic data. But in practice, most judicial police officers lack the training to collect electronic evidence themselves, forcing prosecutors to depend on ANTIC for expert analysis. Because ANTIC is centralized in Yaoundé while Cameroon has 282 courts of first instance and 39 high courts, requests pile up, trials stall, and suspects are released on bail or acquitted for insufficient evidence, as occurred in several of the cases studied.

The study also documents a second, smaller current of jurisprudence in which courts do engage with the specialized law. The Buea Court of First Instance held in one case that a cybercrime is consummated so long as the medium used is electronic communication, whether a website, a text message or a phone call, and advised that doubtful emails be examined by a forensic IT expert. In a 2019 Bamenda ruling, Justice Bikelle Theresia set out the elements the prosecution must establish under section 65 of the Cyber-law for unauthorized access, and the accused was convicted. Yet such decisions remain scarce. The study points to a paucity of cybercrime cases overall, attributing it to trivialization by investigators and prosecutors, settlements between parties, and even alleged connivance with so-called scammers, whose foreign victims rarely file complaints or follow up because of the cost involved.

Why does the judiciary keep reaching for the old codes? The study identifies a web of causes: a shortage of local legal scholarship, with only three publications having analyzed the role of judicial actors in cybercrime prosecution; a weak law reporting system, with a single reporter covering English-speaking Cameroon and none for the Francophone regions; and, above all, inadequate training. Most Cameroonian law faculties offer information and communication technology law only as a final-year module, if at all, and criminal law courses are often taught without any reference to cyber-enabled offending. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Daniel Mekobe Sone, acknowledged the problem in his 2023 address at the solemn reopening of the court, decrying the non-application of cybercrime provisions, the peculiarities of electronic evidence and general public ignorance. The problem is not unique to Cameroon, with similar dynamics documented in Nigeria and South Africa, though the study notes that Cameroon’s over-reliance on its ordinary Penal Code sets it apart.

The prescriptions are concrete. The study recommends that ANTIC, in partnership with the Cameroon Bar Association, mount massive sensitization and training campaigns for lawyers, investigators, prosecutors, court registrars, bailiffs and judges, covering the qualification of offences and the handling of electronic evidence. It calls for revising the Cyber-law itself to address emerging threats such as deepfakes, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and for removing the criminalization of libel, which comparable jurisdictions have struck down as an affront to free speech. It urges Cameroon to ratify the Budapest Convention and the 2024 United Nations Convention against Cybercrime to ease cross-border cooperation, to sanction judicial corruption, to accelerate law reporting, and to stimulate scholarly output. Without these reforms, the study warns, the gap between the digital crimes being committed and the analogue justice being dispensed will only widen, eroding trust in the electronic networks on which the country’s future depends.

Subject of Research: Judicial prosecution of cybercrime and the application of specialized cyber law versus ordinary penal law in Cameroon

Article Title: Rethinking cybercrime prosecution in Cameroon

Article References: Awa, B. (2026). Rethinking cybercrime prosecution in Cameroon. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00582-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00582-5

Keywords: cybercrime, Cameroon, cyber law, prosecution, electronic evidence, Penal Code, judiciary, ANTIC, mobile money fraud, Budapest Convention, legal reform, digital forensics

The scale of digital adoption the researchers documented is striking. Ninety-nine percent of respondents reported using the internet, and smartphone dependency was high across nearly every demographic group surveyed. This mirrors national trends: industry reports such as the Internet in India 2024 study by Kantar and the Internet and Mobile Association of India have tracked hundreds of millions of new users coming online, many of them through inexpensive mobile devices rather than personal computers. In a state like Tripura, where the digital economy expanded rapidly after 2020, the smartphone has become the primary, and often the only, gateway to online services. That concentration matters for security, because mobile-first users tend to encounter phishing links through messaging apps and social media rather than email, and they are less likely to have antivirus software or multi-factor authentication configured on their devices.

The study’s central finding is a familiar but stubborn one: knowing about cyber threats does not automatically translate into defending against them. Respondents showed substantial awareness of cybercrime as a general phenomenon, yet significant gaps persisted between that awareness and the actual adoption of cybersecurity best practices. Password hygiene, the recognition of phishing attempts, willingness to report incidents, and habits around sharing personal data all lagged behind what respondents claimed to know. This awareness-behaviour gap has been documented in security research for years, from the Human Aspects of Information Security Questionnaire studies of employee awareness to the Security Behavior Intentions Scale developed by Egelman and Peer. The Tripura data suggests the gap is not merely a Western workplace phenomenon but a structural feature of digital life in emerging online populations.

To quantify awareness systematically, the researchers constructed a composite Cyber Awareness Index, a descriptive score built from five indicators covering different dimensions of cyber knowledge and behaviour. The index came out at approximately 0.637, a figure the authors are careful to frame appropriately. They note that the index has weak internal consistency, with a Kuder-Richardson reliability coefficient of 0.48, meaning the five indicators do not hang together as a tightly unified measure. Rather than presenting the CAI as a validated instrument of cyber literacy, the team reports it qualitatively, as an exploratory snapshot of where the sampled population stands. This kind of methodological candour is rare and valuable: many awareness surveys present composite scores with far more confidence than their psychometrics justify.

Where the data becomes statistically robust is in the relationship between education and phishing awareness. Using Pearson’s Chi-Square analysis computed directly on respondent-level data, the researchers found a highly significant association between educational qualification and the ability to recognise phishing attacks, with a chi-square statistic of approximately 96.48 and a p-value below 0.001. In practical terms, this means the probability that such a strong pattern would arise by chance is vanishingly small. Education appears to function as a genuine protective factor, at least for the specific skill of spotting fraudulent messages designed to harvest credentials or financial information. The finding aligns with earlier work on phishing during the pandemic, including an analysis of more than 1,100 targeted phishing domains that documented how attackers exploited COVID-19 themes to lend their lures credibility.

The theoretical backbone of the study is Routine Activity Theory, the criminological framework developed by Cohen and Felson in 1979, which holds that crime occurs when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target in the absence of a capable guardian. Applied to the digital sphere, the theory predicts exactly what the pandemic produced: a massive expansion of suitable targets as hundreds of millions of people moved financial transactions, schooling and social interaction online, often without corresponding growth in guardianship, whether that means technical safeguards, institutional reporting channels or personal digital literacy. The authors argue that the post-pandemic digital expansion enlarged the attack surface for cybercriminals, with students and young people emerging as particularly exposed groups. This interpretation is consistent with national data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau, which has recorded rising cybercrime reports, and with international studies from the Netherlands documenting elevated cybercrime prevalence among citizens and small business owners during the pandemic years.

The demographic composition of the sample deserves attention when weighing the findings. The surveyed population skews toward students, government employees and highly educated respondents, groups that are both more likely to be online and more likely to understand survey questions about cybersecurity. The authors are explicit that their results are most directly generalisable to this sampled population and that extending them to the wider population of Tripura should be treated as provisional. This is an important caveat, because the true awareness gap in the general population, particularly among older, rural or less formally educated residents who were harder to reach, may well be larger than the study reports. If even a relatively digitally engaged sample shows weak adoption of protective practices, the unmeasured population is unlikely to fare better.

The methodological choices also shape what can be concluded. The survey was administered offline with a structured questionnaire across diverse demographic groups, an approach that reduces the self-selection bias inherent in online panels and reaches respondents with limited connectivity. Participation was voluntary with informed consent, and the underlying dataset has been made publicly available through the Zenodo repository, allowing other researchers to scrutinise and reuse the data. Binary logistic regression was used to identify predictors of vulnerability, complementing the descriptive statistics and the chi-square analysis. Together, these techniques allow the authors to move beyond simple percentages and ask which characteristics of respondents actually increase or decrease the odds of risky digital behaviour, a far more useful output for policymakers than headline awareness figures alone.

What emerges from the study is a policy problem with clear contours. The authors call for targeted cyber literacy campaigns, strengthened institutional reporting mechanisms and evidence-based policy interventions for cybercrime prevention in Tripura and comparable regional contexts. The emphasis on targeting is significant. A single state-wide awareness campaign would likely reproduce the existing pattern, in which educated respondents absorb the message first and the most vulnerable gain the least. The education-phishing link identified in the data suggests that interventions should be calibrated to educational attainment, with simplified, vernacular, mobile-first formats for populations with less formal schooling. The weak adoption of reporting behaviour points to a second, institutional gap: victims and near-victims need accessible, low-friction channels through which incidents can be reported, both to enable response and to generate the data needed for enforcement.

The broader lesson of the Tripura study extends well beyond one Indian state. The pandemic’s digital acceleration was a global experiment in expanding the population of suitable targets faster than guardianship could grow, and the consequences are still unfolding. Research on fintech cybersecurity challenges, game-theoretic models of digital payment adoption, and evaluations of cyber awareness education on social media platforms all point in the same direction: the human layer remains the weakest link in the security chain, and closing that gap requires sustained, evidence-based investment rather than one-off awareness drives. As internet penetration in regions like north-east India continues to climb, studies of this kind, with their transparent methods, published data and honest treatment of their own limitations, provide the empirical foundation on which effective prevention can finally be built.

Subject of Research: Cybercrime awareness and digital behaviour among residents of Tripura, India, in the post-COVID-19 era

Article Title: Cybercrime awareness and digital behaviour in the post-COVID-19 era: an empirical study from Tripura, India

Article References: Deb, N., Shekhawat, S., Das, R., & Debnath, S. (2026). Cybercrime awareness and digital behaviour in the post-COVID-19 era: an empirical study from Tripura, India. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 485. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01773-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01773-2

Keywords: cybercrime, cybersecurity awareness, phishing, Routine Activity Theory, COVID-19, digital behaviour, Tripura, India, logistic regression, Cyber Awareness Index, cyber literacy, online safety

The research, led by Satu Baruri of B.R. Ambedkar College of Law at Andhra University in India, together with colleagues at Széchenyi István University in Hungary, GITAM Institute of Technology and KL Business School, set out to identify the behavioural and cognitive factors that determine whether digitally active individuals become victims of cybercrime, and what happens to their finances and mental health afterwards. Rather than treating victimisation, financial loss and psychological distress as separate problems, the team built a single integrated framework in which all three outcomes are linked, allowing them to trace how a single security lapse can cascade into both a drained bank account and a deteriorating state of mind.

To construct that framework, the researchers drew on two well-established theories from criminology and health psychology. The first is Cyber Routine Activity Theory, or CRAT, an adaptation of the classic routine activity perspective in criminology, which holds that victimisation occurs when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target in the absence of capable guardianship. In the cyber context, this means that the structure of a person’s digital life, how often they transact online, how much personal information they share, and how visible they are to strangers, shapes their exposure to motivated attackers. The second is Protection Motivation Theory, or PMT, which originated in the study of health behaviour and describes how people weigh threats against their own ability to cope with them. PMT predicts that individuals who perceive themselves as susceptible to a threat and who believe they can take effective protective action will be more likely to adopt safety behaviours.

Combining these two theoretical lenses, the study examined five potential determinants of cybercrime victimisation: digital lifestyle exposure, cybersecurity awareness, financial literacy, perceived susceptibility and risky online behaviours. Digital lifestyle exposure captures the sheer intensity of a person’s online activity, from e-commerce and digital banking to social media engagement. Cybersecurity awareness reflects knowledge of threats and protective practices, such as recognising phishing attempts or using strong authentication. Financial literacy measures a person’s understanding of financial products and risks, which might plausibly help them spot fraudulent investment schemes or unauthorised transactions. Perceived susceptibility, drawn from PMT, is the degree to which individuals believe they could personally fall prey to cyberattacks. Risky online behaviours encompass the concrete actions, clicking unverified links, reusing passwords, oversharing personal data, that create openings for attackers.

The empirical test was quantitative and rigorous. The team administered a structured questionnaire to 397 digitally active individuals and analysed the resulting data using structural equation modelling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to test networks of hypothesised relationships between observed measurements and latent constructs simultaneously. This matters because cybercrime victimisation cannot be directly observed in a survey; it must be inferred from patterns of responses. Structural equation modelling lets the researchers estimate how strongly each behavioural or cognitive factor feeds into victimisation, and how victimisation in turn propagates into financial and psychological harm, while accounting for measurement error in every variable.

The results deliver a clear and, in places, counterintuitive message. Two factors emerged as significant drivers of cybercrime victimisation: cybersecurity awareness and risky online behaviours. The first of these is reassuring in one sense, because it suggests that awareness genuinely matters, but the direction of the relationship underscores a subtlety the authors highlight: awareness and victimisation are intertwined in ways that simple awareness campaigns may not resolve. The second finding is more straightforward. People who engage in risky online behaviours are significantly more likely to be victimised, confirming that the concrete choices users make day to day, not merely the abstract level of threat in their environment, determine whether attackers succeed.

Just as telling are the factors that failed to predict victimisation. Digital lifestyle exposure, financial literacy and perceived susceptibility all showed no significant effects on whether respondents became victims. This is a striking result for anyone who assumes that heavy internet users are automatically the most vulnerable, or that people who understand finance are better at avoiding fraud. The study suggests that simply living much of one’s life online does not, by itself, determine victimisation, and that knowing how money works does not translate automatically into recognising a scam. Even perceived susceptibility, the psychological sense of being at risk, did not translate into protection. In other words, feeling vulnerable is not the same as being safe, and subjective risk perception alone does not shield users from attack.

The second half of the model examined what victimisation does to people, and here the findings are sobering. Cybercrime victimisation was found to contribute significantly to both financial loss and mental health deterioration. Moreover, the study reports a bidirectional relationship: victimisation drives financial and psychological harm, and those harms in turn feed back into the experience of victimisation. This feedback loop is perhaps the study’s most important conceptual contribution. A victim who has lost money may become more anxious and distracted, which can impair judgement and increase the likelihood of further victimisation. Psychological distress and financial strain are not merely consequences of cybercrime; within this framework they become part of the mechanism that sustains it.

The authors argue that these findings underscore the importance of behavioural practices in shaping cyber vulnerability. If risky online behaviours are the significant behavioural pathway into victimisation, then interventions that target specific behaviours, rather than general awareness messaging alone, are likely to be more effective. The study offers insights for the development of cybersecurity awareness programmes and behavioural risk mitigation strategies, suggesting that efforts to reduce cybercrime’s toll should focus on changing what people actually do online, and should recognise that the financial and psychological consequences of victimisation are deeply interconnected. Treating a victim’s financial recovery and mental health support as separate problems, the framework implies, misses the way each can aggravate the other.

The research also makes a methodological and conceptual contribution to the literature. By considering behavioural, financial and psychological outcomes within a single structural model, the study moves beyond fragmented approaches that examine cybercrime victimisation, monetary loss and mental health in isolation. The work was conducted with ethical approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee of Andhra University, with voluntary, anonymous participation and digital informed consent from all respondents, all of whom were adults. Published open access, the study arrives at a moment when digital technologies continue to spread faster than the protective habits needed to use them safely. Its central lesson is one that individuals, educators and policymakers alike can act on: the strongest predictor of cyber harm is not how much time you spend online, how much you know about finance, or even how vulnerable you feel, but what you actually do when the next suspicious link, message or offer appears on your screen.

Subject of Research: Behavioural and cognitive determinants of cybercrime victimisation and its financial and mental health consequences

Article Title: Behavioural and cognitive determinants of financial loss and mental health deterioration following cybercrime victimisation

Article References: Baruri, S., Manikyam, S., Rejeb, A., Roy, R., & Mukherjee, S. (2026). Behavioural and cognitive determinants of financial loss and mental health deterioration following cybercrime victimisation. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00468-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00468-6

Keywords: cybercrime, cybersecurity awareness, mental health, financial loss, digital lifestyle, risky online behaviour, victimisation, structural equation modelling, routine activity theory, protection motivation theory, financial literacy, online fraud

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