Pip: Fraud follows users the way spam follows email — and freerein61's latest piece for A Trumpet of Sedition asks why that keeps happening no matter which platform we flee to.
Mara: The post traces online fraud from Nigeria's Yahoo Boys to Southeast Asia's scam compounds to Bluesky's phishing wave last October — and argues the thread connecting all of it is economic, not technological.
Pip: Let's start with the Bluesky attack itself and what it reveals about who the scammers actually are.
The Bluesky Scammers and the Economy Behind Them
Mara: The starting point is a phishing campaign that hit Bluesky on 17 October — compromised accounts pushing a fake government payment, and a platform scrambling to contain it.
Pip: The scale is concrete. Agent Sky's independent analysis of Bluesky's public moderation stream recorded 3,896 reversed account takedowns between 17 and 19 October alone, coinciding with the incident.
Mara: And that sits inside a platform growing fast — Bluesky went from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users in 2025, nearly 60 per cent growth. More users, more surface area for fraud.
Pip: So the phishing attack is the headline, but the post is really asking a harder question: why does this keep regenerating everywhere?
Mara: The argument is structural. The post draws a direct line to Nigeria's Yahoo Boys — not as a racial explanation, but as an economic one. It quotes the doctoral research of Tolulope Lembola Ojolo, who interviewed 29 Yahoo Boys across Lagos, Ibadan and Ado-Ekiti and identified "poverty, unemployment, corrupt political leadership and law enforcement, the failure of vital social institutions, and the proliferation of internet services as conditions that combined to facilitate cybercrime."
Pip: That list is doing real work. Nigeria's 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index found 133 million people — 63 per cent of the population — multidimensionally poor. The headline unemployment figure is 7.2 per cent, but informal employment runs at 92.7 per cent. The number hides the precarity underneath.
Mara: The post is careful to say social explanation is not moral absolution. The victims — particularly young people targeted by sextortion, with verified links to more than 40 suicides across North America, Australia and the UK — have an unqualified right to protection.
Pip: And then the post moves to Southeast Asia, where the scam economy has gone fully industrial — compounds combining internet fraud with human trafficking, with the UN estimating 120,000 people potentially held in Myanmar alone, forced to run scams.
Mara: The post also covers how this pattern reached Bluesky specifically. Romance scams, pig-butchering schemes, impersonators targeting artists — NBC News flagged a rapid increase in December 2024. Editor Rob Bignell documented fake beta-reader and editor profiles targeting writers in July 2026. Writers and illustrators working precariously are exactly the population fraud preys on.
Pip: One insecure layer of the workforce turned against another. That's the mechanism the post keeps returning to.
Mara: And moderation alone cannot close that gap. User-submitted reports on Bluesky rose 54 per cent between 2024 and 2025. "Misleading" content accounted for 43.73 per cent of reports in 2025. The platform expanded to roughly 100 moderators during 2024 — a year it received 6.48 million reports.
Pip: The post's conclusion is that policing symptoms has repeatedly failed because the conditions reproducing the problem — mass insecurity, concentrated wealth, precarious employment — remain untouched.
Mara: What it calls for is democratic control over communications infrastructure and economic reorganisation around social need. That's the argument the title is pointing toward all along.
Pip: So the Bluesky phishing wave is a symptom, and the Yahoo Boys are a historical chapter in a much longer story about what poverty does to the internet.
Mara: And what the internet does to poverty. The next episode will tell us whether the platforms or the underlying conditions move first.
