Nigerian Man Who Lost N150,000 to Yahoo Boys Narrates How It Happened, Video Goes Viral
6 min read
- A Nigerian man has shared a video on TikTok narrating how he lost N150,000 to Yahoo boys after launching an app
- In a video, he narrated how the boys had discovered a loophole in his app which they used in 'stealing' money from him
- While narrating his painful experience, he seized the opportunity to caution newbies in tech who may also try to create an app or online product
A Nigerian app developer unfortunately lost N150,000 to internet fraudsters, popularly known as "Yahoo Boys", after launching his app, Runham.
According to him, the fraudsters exploited a major loophole in his app to steal money from him.
Source: TikTok
Man recounts losing N150k to Yahoo boys
The developer, known on TikTok as @lagosbash, narrated his experience in a video that he posted via his account.
He explained that he had built the app on his own without any mentorship, which led to several mistakes, including a flaw that allowed the fraudsters to hack into the system.
In his words:
"How I lost N150k to Yahoo boys. I lost N150,000 to our Nigerian yahoo boys and this is how it happened. So after I launched my first app, Runham app, because the app is my first app, the first thing I built while learning programming, there were few things or a lot of things that I missed out. I learned programming myself, I didn't get anybody to teach me or I didn't have anybody to teach me. Here's the thing, if you are learning programming by yourself, you will make a whole lot of mistakes and these mistakes are avoidable, something that if you ask somebody like, if you had a mentor, you ask the person, the person can just say do it like this and you avoid a whole lot of issues.
Source: TikTok
"Now, this is what happened after I built the app, it went live, I was making daily transaction of about N200k daily, you understand? So in total, the app made about N32 million in transactions, like volume of transactions so far. So what these boys do is they go to Play store or Apple store, they look out for new apps that are newly uploaded to the store because they know that these apps are new, they could be one or two bugs or error in the app. So they download the app, try to look for the error and try to use it to hack the app or withdraw money from the app.
"Now because it was my first product, I didn't know quite a few things and there was one button I did not add null to the button. Null means if you click on a button like, if you click on a button on an app or website, the button disables until the transaction finishes processing before the button comes live again. Now what they do is, because I didn't put null option on the button, they click the button one, two, three, four, and what it does is, if you are buying airtime like N5,000 airtime, if you go and buy the airtime times four, which is N20,000.
"Now this is because another mistake I made was I debit your balance after I've credited you the airtime, which is not what banks do. Understand, what banks do is, you want to buy airtime, then first of all debit your balance, understand? When they debit you, they now credit you the airtime, understand? If your transaction was not successful, that's when they can now refund you after a while.
"So my own case, what I was doing is, let me confirm the transaction is successful before I debit the user. So once they click the button one, two, three, four, you understand? Because you have to buy the airtime first before crediting the user. So if you buy the airtime into four places and now start debiting the user, at the end of the day, the user will now have, you know, the user had N5k before in the account, the user will now have minus N15,000 in their balance, they will be having minus.
"Now these guys, you know what they were doing? They were opening different accounts on my platform with different email addresses and doing this thing. Ah, ah, I just wake up, I now fund, I will now fund my wallet with eh N50,000, it will finish and deposit will not be up to N5,000. I now fund again. I noticed that something was wrong, but there were other people who were buying stuff like data and crediting their, you know, sport wallet. I didn't want to disable the whole system or shut the whole system down. Now I was trying to find out where the error was coming from, I didn't see where the error was coming from, you understand? I didn't see.
"I took one of the numbers of the yahoo boys, I called him, say bro, I am calling from this so-so company, why are you stealing money from our company? The guy was like eh. I threatened him, I told him I have all his details, which I did at that point in time, you understand? I had all his details, phone number, BVN, and stuff. I told him that I could use it to track him or get to the police and all that. How much he want use track person with still N150k? How much?
"And it was not only him, like there were different persons that you know conjoined and did the whole stuff, like about three or four persons that saw that loophole. Now at the end of the day, he told me what the problem was. It took him to tell me what the problem was, I didn't know. Now these are the issues you could face as a newbie starting out in tech."
Reactions as man shares heartbreaking experience
TikTok users reacted to the video in the comments section.
@Oluwatobiloba Emmanuel said:
"This happens to me few months ago I lost 45k he was trying to withdraw 1m 2m but my payment gateway keeps sending otp na God save me. It was caused by closing x on the transfer modal and I didn’t remember to add transaction sessions and cool down."
@🅁🄰🄹 commented:
"They can decompile your app and see the your api endpoints, interact with your api, login and use token for purchase endpoints concurrently using some softwares, you still have a lot to do on your backend not frontend. You don’t build financial product like any other app."
@kin. | Mobile App Developer said:
"If I may ask what tool/language did you use in creating your app (also I will advise you to join communities/and run in house testing with your folks before deployment this things are very important)."
@Joshua Izu reacted:
"It's a very common scam in the fintech space. That's why we atomize transactions. Very sad that people use it to scam companies."
@Herms added:
"Please sir don’t complain don’t explain to anybody because even if you give them for free they will not credit you."
See the post below:
Heartbroken German lady exposes scammer
Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that a German lady shared her painful experience with a Nigerian man whom she accused of scamming her.
According to the lady, she sent $18,000 to the young man who claimed to be a web developer but he ghosted her afterwards.
Source: Legit.ng
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