The busting of an hideous cybercrime, otherwise called Yahoo Yahoo, training school in Delta State, by the military penultimate Saturday signposts the deep morass we have been sunk as a nation; the moral depravity into which we are now mired by the day.
A Yahoo Yahoo training school? This is a sordid tale of otherwise innocent teenagers already being descaled of every shade of moral rectitude. They are being weaned on a life of ‘professional’ cyber criminality and unleashed into the society as wastrels.
According to reports, about 150 teenagers, whose ages ranged from 17,18,19 & 20, were arrested by men of the 3 Battalion of the Nigerian Army, who stormed the Hustle Kingdom Cybercrime School in Effurun, Uvwie, Delta State.
About 90 of the teenagers were arrested in the morning, while 60, including the owner of the odious school, were nabbed in the evening of the same day. They were immediately handed over to the police for further investigation and prosecution.
According to the state Police Public Relations Officer, SP Bright Edafe, the teenagers were lured into a trap with promises that they would be taught forex and crypto business, only to be forced into learning the nitty gritty of cybercrime.
The police said the modus operandi of the Yahoo Yahoo training kingpins “is that they would engage their agents who go on social media to flaunt the wealth that is not even theirs and convince unsuspecting boys from the ages of 17,18,19 and 20 that they want to teach them forex and cypto business.
“They lure some of them from Kaduna, Akwa Ibom and Ibadan to that particular estate and beat the hell out of them, feeding them when they feel like feeding them.” They were reportedly training the teenagers as potential internet fraudsters.
They were using an Army Estate, a high brow residence for retired military officers and civilians as a cover to perpetrate heinous activities.
This is the wispish hue that this whole cybercrime heist has assumed. Teenagers are now being initiated into the inveterate world that is bound to stricture their future. Before our very eyes, what began as a cybercrime larceny has suddenly metamorphosed into a ghoulish, blood-sucking derring-do.
At a stage, the larceny graduated into Yahoo Plus variant, a euphemism for money rituals. We soon began to hear of obscenities: girls’ panties being stolen; bread being munched with putrid mounds of faeces and human parts being used, all in the fetish orgy to satiate mammoth, the god of money!
As the obscenities increase, so do ill-gotten wealth grow. Today, cyber criminals’ tentacles are spread everywhere. A panoply of magnificent architectural masterpieces have continued to sprout like mushrooms in the neighborhoods of our cities. And all shades of their glittering wonders on wheels glide through our roads, a fetid splendour tainted by blood!
How did we come to this squalid pass? The atrocious regress in the lives of our youths came on us gradually through the bogey of unemployment. Corruption, consistent pillaging and gross mismanagement of the nation’s resources by successive inept leaders led to the depletion of the common till.
One of the ineluctable aftermaths has been the lack of gainful employment for the teeming population of the nation’s skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labour force. Thousands of able-bodied youths hit the labour market yearly, trudging offices for non-existent jobs. The latest unemployment rate among youths, aged 15-24, according to the Labour Force Survey in the Third Quarter of 2023, as gleaned from the National Bureau of Statistics(NBS),for example, stood at 8.6 per cent in that quarter.
The labour force participation rate among the working-age population declined to 79.5 per cent in the same quarter, compared to 80.4 per cent in the second quarter of 2023.
The combined rate of unemployment and time-related underemployment as a share of the labour force population increased to 17.3 per cent in the third quarter of 2023 from 15.5 per cent in the second quarter. The percentage of youths Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET)(those who are completely idle) was 13.7 per cent in the third quarter of 2023. Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose to 5.3 per cent in the first quarter of this year, compared to five per cent recorded in the previous quarter.
The devil, as they say, finds jobs for idle hands as nature abhors a vacuum. Frustrated and egregious elements among the lot began to fiddle with the cobra’s tail, venturing into crimes such as armed robberies, Advance Fee Fraud, otherwise known as 419,and pipeline vandalism. They soon graduated in sophistication into kidnapping for ransom and cybercrime.
Nigeria is growing in cybercrime in sophistication and pervasiveness. Available data is scary. With an average of 97 cybercrime victims recorded per hour in 2022, for example, it implies that there is a victim of cybercrime every 37 seconds. In addition, two internet users have had their data leaked every second in the year .This is an improvement over 2021 where six users had their data leaked every second.
We are now being ranked among the five top-notch countries with the greatest cyber criminal threats. Russia tops the index, followed by Ukraine, China, the United States of America, Nigeria and Romania, in that order.
Again, the obscenic flaunting of opulence and ostentatious displays of materialism in our society have been an execrable incentive to lure youths into the gangland world of get-rich-by-all-means. That means they are ready to do anything, including committing the most heinous of crimes, to get rich.
Many of our leaders at various levels revel in open profligacy and outlandish lifestyles, while wealthy private individuals who obviously made their money through less-than-honest means openly flaunt their obscene wealth, including spraying money excessively in ‘Owambe’ parties. These are incautious indulgences that goad our restless and impatient youths into the ferocity of crimes.
The busting of the Yahoo Yahoo training school in Delta is highly commendable on the part of the military officers involved. Let the military intelligence units collaborate more with the police to unnerve more of such hideous criminal havens.
Cybercrime is an ubiquitous gangland that pervades the entire landscape. Let the same collaborative effort that led to the arrest of the suspects in the net be encouraged to put paid to the new but dangerous trend of forcefully initiating innocent teenagers into cyber criminality.
