In Nigeria’s illicit cybercrime training schools known as hustle kingdoms, there are no locks on the doors. Yet the young men being coerced into a life of online fraud don’t leave.
They are held in place by something more durable than a lock and tougher to break than a chain. They are held by juju oaths, a practice tied to traditional West African spirituality.
Juju is typically used as a form of protection. However, hustle kingdom operators, known as chairmen, have weaponized it. They tell their victims that breaking a juju oath by leaving or reporting on what happens in a hustle kingdom would threaten their spirits and those of their family members.
The result is a form of imprisonment known as “escapelessness,” according to researcher Suleman Lazarus, who studies hustle kingdoms in Nigeria and Ghana.
“Spiritual threats carry coercive weight because the belief system animating them is widely shared,” Lazarus wrote in a recent report co-authored by researchers Adebayo Benedict Soares and Mark Button and published by the United Kingdom’s Taylor & Francis Group.
“Ancestral spirits are understood as influential spiritual agents,” the researchers wrote. “They are believed to be omniscient, and no offender escapes their surveillance. Within contexts where spiritual harm is socially meaningful, such threats operate as a coercive technology even in the absence of handcuffs.”
Lazarus studied one incident in which Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission convicted people involved in a hustle kingdom. Although hustle kingdom victims often are seen as willing participants, the coercion they feel is not so different from cybercrime operations in Asia, where people are held under guard, according to Lazarus.
“Physical coercion is visible: locked doors, armed guards, confiscated documents,” Lazarus wrote recently for The Conversation. “Spiritual or psychological coercion is invisible: the fear of consequences no one can see, but many believe. One restrains the body. The other restrains the mind. The outcome is the same.”
Online scams cost victims as much as $3 billion across Africa and account for 30% of all West African crime, according to a recent Interpol analysis. Scams often involve emails that offer fake cryptocurrency investments, romance scams that trick people into providing banking and personal information, and sexual extortion threats that use real or AI-generated explicit images to force victims to pay.
The perpetrators of the scams, known as Sakawa Boys in Ghana and Yahoo Boys in Nigeria, typically are young men in their late teens and 20s looking for work or training in countries with high youth unemployment. Many hustle kingdoms promote themselves as free academies that teach online skills only to trap their victims in crime, according to Lazarus.
“Poverty, youth unemployment, and absent social welfare systems are the soil in which these schools grow,” he added. “These [hustle kingdom] mechanisms produced fear, dependency, and restricted autonomy without consistent visible restraint.”
Reining in hustle kingdoms is complicated because they operate underground and threaten their workers. Legal approaches vary. Nigeria, for example, cracks down on hustle kingdoms, but Ghana tends to be more lenient, according to Lazarus.
Nigerian cybercriminals move to Ghana to exploit the difference in enforcement. As a result, authorities are hard-pressed to shut down hustle kingdoms, according to Lazarus.
“The absence of additional prosecuted cases reflects enforcement gaps, not scarcity of the phenomenon itself,” he wrote.