Research Articles (Anthropology and Sociology)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10566/566

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‘Funds left delaware in the morning’: online fraud networks and money laundering operations
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2026) Lazarus, Suleman Ibrahim
This article examines United States v. Lawal as forensic ethnography. It reads courtroom transcripts, cooperating witness testimony, and exhibits as cultural artefacts that disclose the symbolic, strategic, and infrastructural logics of hybrid online fraud. The analysis draws on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) testimony, money mule accounts, and prosecutorial framing to explore how romance fraud and Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes converge through shared infrastructures and distributed role allocation. The analysis produced several themes. Here, I foreground three that carry the article’s central analytic weight. (1) Hybrid cybercrimes exceed typological boundaries and challenge law enforcement classifications. (2) Cybercriminal identity operates as functionally modular, distributed across multiple actors, accounts, and personas, which enables operational flexibility and risk dispersion. (3) Laundering infrastructures, though sophisticated, remain fragile, reflecting both aspirational and precarious logics of transnational capital flows. The analysis also reveals how offenders linguistically reframed victims as “clients” or “my partner's clients”. They deployed commercial vocabulary as a neutralisation strategy that repositioned fraud as a business practice. The article treats legal archives as state-produced knowledge systems and theorises “laundering circuits” and “emotional scripts” as conceptual frameworks. These frameworks illuminate how digital fraud functions as both a dramaturgical performance and a structurally embedded response to global inequality.
A crime script perspective on mapping the entry, continuation, and exit pathways of online romance fraud
(Routledge, 2026) Lazarus, Suleman; Abubakari, Yushawu; Oseh-Ovarah, Valeen
Online romance fraud has received increasing scholarly and policy attention due to its socioeconomic and psychological consequences. While prior research has examined the technical, psychological, and structural conditions that enable these scams, far less is known about the temporal and behavioural processes that shape how individuals enter, sustain, and exit them. This study addresses that gap using qualitative data from publicly available court case files and interviews with active and former offenders. Drawing on Crime Script Analysis (CSA), it maps the sequence of offender behaviour, including pre-entry preparation, operational stages, and pathways out of fraudulent activity. Findings show that romance fraud is not opportunistic but a structured enterprise requiring planning, adaptation, and sustained deception. Exit is commonly triggered by law enforcement pressure, reduced financial returns, and moments of moral conflict. The study advances cybercrime research by illuminating the dynamics of recruitment, socialisation, and disengagement, with particular attention to Global South contexts.
‘Funds left Delaware in the morning’: online fraud networks and money laundering operations
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2026) Lazarus, Suleman
This article examines United States v. Lawal as forensic ethnography. It reads courtroom transcripts, cooperating witness testimony, and exhibits as cultural artefacts that disclose the symbolic, strategic, and infrastructural logics of hybrid online fraud. The analysis draws on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) testimony, money mule accounts, and prosecutorial framing to explore how romance fraud and Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes converge through shared infrastructures and distributed role allocation. The analysis produced several themes. Here, I foreground three that carry the article’s central analytic weight. (1) Hybrid cybercrimes exceed typological boundaries and challenge law enforcement classifications. (2) Cybercriminal identity operates as functionally modular, distributed across multiple actors, accounts, and personas, which enables operational flexibility and risk dispersion. (3) Laundering infrastructures, though sophisticated, remain fragile, reflecting both aspirational and precarious logics of transnational capital flows. The analysis also reveals how offenders linguistically reframed victims as “clients” or “my partner's clients”. They deployed commercial vocabulary as a neutralisation strategy that repositioned fraud as a business practice. The article treats legal archives as state-produced knowledge systems and theorises “laundering circuits” and “emotional scripts” as conceptual frameworks. These frameworks illuminate how digital fraud functions as both a dramaturgical performance and a structurally embedded response to global inequality.
A crime script perspective on mapping the entry, continuation, and exit pathways of online romance fraud
(Routledge, 2026) Abubakari, Yushawu; Lazarus, Suleman ; Oseh-Ovarah, Valeen
Online romance fraud has received increasing scholarly and policy attention due to its socioeconomic and psychological consequences. While prior research has examined the technical, psychological, and structural conditions that enable these scams, far less is known about the temporal and behavioural processes that shape how individuals enter, sustain, and exit them. This study addresses that gap using qualitative data from publicly available court case files and interviews with active and former offenders. Drawing on Crime Script Analysis (CSA), it maps the sequence of offender behaviour, including pre-entry preparation, operational stages, and pathways out of fraudulent activity. Findings show that romance fraud is not opportunistic but a structured enterprise requiring planning, adaptation, and sustained deception. Exit is commonly triggered by lawenforcement pressure, reduced financial returns, and moments of moral conflict. The study advances cybercrime research by illuminating the dynamics of recruitment, socialisation, and disengagement, with particular attention to Global South contexts.
Advancing sociological understanding of felt and enacted stigma through the experience of mothers raising children with disabilities in Nigeria
(SAGE Publications Ltd, 2026) Platt, Lucinda; Lazarus, Suleman; Edward-Dibiana, Duma; Dibiana, Edward Tochukwu
A longstanding sociological tradition of stigma research has highlighted its salience and consequences, both for children with disabilities and their parents. Yet, while it is recognised that forms of stigma are embedded in structural conditions and social context, understanding of how disability-related stigma plays out is overwhelmingly restricted to high-income countries. This is despite the fact that the prevalence of child disability is higher, and the associated economic and social challenges more severe in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This article advances sociological understanding of disability-related stigma and its consequences through thematic analysis of interviews with 22 mothers of children with disabilities in Nigeria. We analyse how their experience is embedded in the structural features of their society, an LMIC marked by high inequality, constrained state schooling, and an absence of disability support. We show how these conditions help perpetuate forms of felt stigma rooted in dominant cultural understandings of disability that serve to isolate mothers, and forms of enacted stigma typified by children’s educational and social exclusion. We further explore how mothers negotiate these attitudes and behaviours. Our findings show both concordance with and difference from existing sociological studies of disability-related stigma, demonstrating the relevance of attending to salient but under-researched settings.
Exploring waste management practices among backyard dwellers in Fisantekraal, South Africa
(Springer Science and Business Media B.V, 2025) Nyakabawu, Shingirai; Schenck, Catherina Johanna
Waste management in South Africa remains a challenge, particularly for backyard dwellers who are excluded from formal waste services. While existing studies focus on housing and social vulnerabilities, little research examines their waste management practices. This article fills this gap by arguing that backyard waste challenges stem from structural exclusions rather than individual negligence. Data were gathered by means of a questionnaire survey of 284 backyard dwellers in Fisantekraal. Using an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) lens, the study highlights systemic inequities in urban waste governance. Although backyard dwellers receive regular weekly municipal waste collection, waste leakages persist, with illegal dumping in open spaces, roads and informal sites. Findings also reveal a sanitation divide and micro-governance by landlords who restrict bin access, all of which reflects infrastructural liminality in backyard waste management.
Space transition theory and its empirical applications in cybercrime research: a PRISMA-guided systematic review (2007 to 2025)
(Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 2026) Lazarus, Suleman; Yushawu, Abubakari
This study presents the first PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses)-guided review of empirical applications of Space Transition Theory (STT) in peer-reviewed research (2007 to 2025). Nineteen studies were identified across qualitative (n = 10), quantitative (n = 7), and mixed-method (n = 2) designs. Study contexts span multiple regions, with strong representation from West Africa and Southeast Asia. The findings support STT’s relevance to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), showing how platform affordances such as anonymity, identity flexibility, and asynchronous communication can enable disinhibition, norm transgression, and moral disengagement. At the same time, the evidence indicates uneven explanatory reach, as STT under-specifies cultural meaning-making, structural inequality, and platform-specific architectures. Even so, STT remains a useful mid-range scaffold for analysing behavioural discontinuities across offline and online space. The review further shows how STT can inform HCI debates on anticipatory design, behavioural accountability, and the ethical governance of digital platforms.
Evolutionary fraud, the global scamming ecosystem and a typology of actors
(Academic Press, 2026) Lazarus, Suleman; Button, Mark; Hock, Branislav
This study examines the adaptive nature of the global scamming ecosystem, focusing on developing a novel typology based on the size and organizational structure of scam operations. Through a combination of qualitative and case study analysis, the research categorizes scammers into five distinct groups, namely, “Demons,” “Gorgons,” “Ogres,” “Behemoths,” and “Mega Behemoths,” ranging from lone actors to large-scale enterprises with intricate hierarchies and international reach. The findings highlight how organizational size, specialisation, and corrupt actors' involvement contribute to scam operations' effectiveness and resilience. Findings also illustrate the adaptive processes observed in legitimate business practices, including role specialisation and hierarchical organization strategic planning. The paper also notes the evolutionary processes creating more effective scams and means of delivering them. The study provides a foundational understanding of these dynamics, offering a framework for targeted, flexible strategies and robust international cooperation. Findings also highlight the importance of continued interdisciplinary collaboration to address these evolving threats.
Contesting the just transition from the Waterberg Coalfield: grounded socio-ecological possibilities for (co)habitable futures
(Routledge, 2026-04-16) Wingfield, Matthew Michael; Luckett, Thembi
Anthropogenic climate change through fossil-fuel reliance has necessitated decarbonisationon a global scale. The “Just Transition,” as a concept embedded in a particular and shiftingdiscursive context, weighs up environmental ambitions against material livelihood impacts, andis increasingly gaining significant political currency. It is, however, often implemented in atop-down techno-managerial manner that flattens out localised socio-ecological and contextuallyspecific dynamics. By thinking from the Waterberg Coalfield in Limpopo, South Africa, weexplore the tensions between local livelihoods dependent on fossil-fuel capital and those that arehistorically foreclosed and are at increased future risk due to the South African government’scontinued commitment to coal economies. By embedding debates about future “justice” inthe history of injustice, racialised dispossession and enclosure, we explore how the politicalecologies of land, water and energy are folded into a politics of a just transition from below. Agranular and relational analysis of these divergent livelihoods and their socio-ecological basesoffers the possibility for transformative pathways of “just” futures for the Waterberg and beyond.
Pulpit, power, and predation: “Yahoo men of God,” prosperity theology, and the twin fraud triangles
(SAGE Publications Ltd, 2025) Lazarus, Suleman; Tickner, Peter; Button, Mark
We analyse public discourse on pastors’ unethical financial exploitation within the charismatic Christian community. Using qualitative content analysis of social-media responses, we examine how the public perceives, discusses, and interprets these cases, privileging emic viewpoints. We find that faith leaders are seen to exploit congregants’ social trust and spiritual devotion for personal gain. Grounded in Donald Cressey’s Fraud Triangle theory, we identify key components of fraudulent behavior in religious contexts while extending the framework to introduce the “Twin Fraud Triangles.” This expanded model incorporates both the cultural logic of perpetrators and the subjective experiences of their congregations and observers, providing a more nuanced understanding of fraud in religious settings. Our findings call for greater awareness and community-led safeguards to protect spiritual and financial well-being. This study contributes to ongoing debates on trust, authority, and moral economies within religious institutions, offering insights that could inform future community responses and interventions.
Sexual sanctions and solidarity: Heterosexual schoolgirls’ negotiations of cisheteronormativity in two South African high schools
(Routledge, 2026) Mayeza, Emmanuel; Bhana, Deevia; Janak, Raksha
This paper examines how female heterosexual learners negotiate cisheteronormativity within South African school contexts. Using a qualitative design, we draw on two single-sex focus groups with girls aged 15–17 in two KwaZulu-Natal high schools. Cisheteronormativity is utilised as a conceptual lens to show how gendered norms naturalise a sex/gender binary and privilege heterosexuality while also opening avenues for contestation. The findings illustrate how support for gender and sexual diversity is produced in the context of girls’ reference to constitutional equality, religious and moral frames, as well as through school rituals like the matric dance. However, inclusion coexists with the reproduction of cisheteronormative binaries suggesting that acceptance of sexual diversity is partial and precarious. The paper also draws attention to the policing of boys’ masculinity and sexuality through peer surveillance, showing how masculinity is especially under pressure in the context of gender-nonconforming conduct. Despite these constraints, participants propose strategies that deal with cisheteronormativity through learner-led support groups, school counsellors, comprehensive sexuality education, and partnerships with community organisations. We conclude the paper with implications for advancing sexual diversity and justice in South African schools.
Fraud as legitimate retribution for colonial injustice: neutralization techniques in interviews with police and online romance fraud offenders
(Routledge, 2025) Lazarus, Suleman; Hughes, Mariata; Button, Mark
This qualitative research examines the phenomenon of online romance fraud, exploring it from contrasting perspectives. The study engaged two distinct groups of participants: (1) fraudsters actively involved in online romance scams (commonly referred to as “Sakawa Boys”) and (2) police officers with experience in investigating and policing internet crimes. We explore the usefulness of neutralization techniques in interpreting data within the cultural context of individuals’ subjective experiences. Thematic analysis of data reveals that both offenders and police officers employ certain neutralization techniques, such as denial of responsibility, condemnation of the condemners, and appeals to higher loyalties, to justify their conduct. In particular, online romance offenders invoke higher loyalties, rationalizing their actions as reparative justice for colonial exploitation and framing their fraud as a means of reclaiming wealth unjustly taken during colonial rule. The findings suggest that participants perceive the enduring legacy of colonialism as a key factor driving the production of cybercrime. This research contributes to the scant body of direct testimonies from romance fraud offenders, which are significantly rarer than those from police officers, providing valuable insights into this global phenomenon. Methodologically and theoretically, this research contributes to understanding the global phenomenon of scammers targeting individuals worldwide. © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
What do we know about human trafficking and scam compounds in Southeast Asia (2020–2025)? A qualitative meta-synthesis of coercive deviant enterprises
(Routledge, 2026) Lazarus, Suleman; Chiang, Mina; Dimitrova, Rossitza Stefanova
This study synthesizes peer-reviewed research on human trafficking linked to scam compounds in Southeast Asia (2020 to 2025) to understand their organizational, spatial, and coercive infrastructures. Applying a Qualitative Meta-Synthesis (QMS) protocol, it integrates findings from fifty publications. These outputs comprise forty-five journal articles, three conference papers, one book chapter, and one monograph. As a consolidated evidentiary base, this QMS constitutes the first systematic review to integrate scam-compound economies into broader research on trafficking and forced labor in Southeast Asia. The included studies employ qualitative, mixed-methods, and conceptual approaches, drawing on survivor interviews, NGO and law enforcement perspectives, and legal analyses. Results show that scam compounds function as industrialized socio-technical systems embedded within licit-illicit economies, exploiting digital infrastructures, deregulated Special Economic Zones, and migration precarity. Cross-study patterns highlight hierarchical divisions of labor, coercion, and liminal victim-offender roles. Divergences reflect local political economies and adaptive organizational forms. The synthesis situates scam compounds within the broader history of illicit economies. The study demonstrates the value of the QMS for advancing theoretical coherence in fragmented literatures on deviance.
Afrobeats, moral disengagement and the cultural politics of online fraud: the difference between a twitch and a wink Is vast
(Routledge, 2026) Lazarus, Suleman; Olaigbe, Olatunji; Lazarus, Scipio E.
This article examines how Afrobeats reframes online fraud through mechanisms of moral disengagement, interrogating 40 songs by Nigerian artists (2023 to 2025). Drawing on Bandura's theory and cultural sociology, it interprets lyrics as moral texts. Thematically, it identifies five recurrent patterns: (i) victim dehumanisation through predator-prey metaphors (e.g., maga), (ii) reframing fraud as “hustle” or divine blessing, (iii) minimisation of agency via structural poverty or spiritual forces, (iv) cyber-spiritualism (Yahoo Plus), where juju rituals ensure success and protect fraudsters, and (v) glamorisation through aspirational global aesthetics. Structurally, fraud references operate as career-contingent resources, more common among emerging than established artists. All credited vocalists are male, highlighting gendered exclusion. Lyrics also encode temporal discipline, depicting synchronisation with Western time zones as both a moral duty and a logistical necessity for transnational fraud. Beyond technical coding, Afrobeats is read as a moral and cultural text through which identity, aspiration, and legitimacy are negotiated under postcolonial inequality and digital capitalism. It functions as a moral economy in which fraud is glamorised, spiritualised, and rarely contested. As a shared cultural grammar, these lyrics convert deviance into symbolic capital and export local fraud imaginaries, shaping global perceptions of Yahoo Boys and their victims.
The weaponization of football dreams in human trafficking schemes
(Routledge, 2025) Lazarus, Suleman
This Brief Report highlights how football (i.e. soccer) dreams are weaponized to traffic youth within West Africa. Framed as an athletic opportunity, the operation exploited the Economic Community of West African States’ visa-free protocols, digital platforms, and the powerful appeal of sport-based mobility. Victims were confined, stripped of documentation, and coerced into soliciting funds from family members, with their phones repurposed to perpetrate further acts of fraud. While trafficking for forced criminality has gained visibility in Southeast Asia, this case marks a critical yet underexplored intra-African iteration, shaped by the symbolic economy of football. It challenges siloed policy frameworks that treat sport aspiration and cybercrime in West Africa as separate domains.
From business centres to Hustle Kingdoms: historical perspectives on innovative models of deviant education
(Cambridge University Press, 2025) Lazarus, Suleman; Soares, Adebayo Benedict
The article pioneers the examination of "hustle kingdoms": illegal cybercrime training academies in West Africa. It explores these entities as innovative and adaptive institutions that emerge in response to systemic socio-economic strain. This article provides a unique analysis of hustle kingdoms by situating their emergence within the region's socio-economic, cultural and technological trajectories. It does so by assessing the contemporary manifestation of these cybercrime academies with history in mind to understand the past that created them. It highlights how these cybercrime training academies have evolved from earlier forms, thereby showcasing a unique form of deviant innovation. It contributes to existing literature by addressing the critical gap in the scholarly discourse surrounding these entities and their historical evolution. Drawing on Merton's strain theory, this historical scholarly endeavour examines how systemic barriers to education and employment have fostered deviant innovation, transforming hustle kingdoms from early fraud enterprises into sophisticated, global cybercrime networks. The analysis highlights the structural disparities that sustain their operations by juxtaposing these academies with conventional educational frameworks. The findings offer novel insights into the intersection of inequality, cultural narratives and technological adaptation, positioning hustle kingdoms as both products and catalysts of systemic strain.
Cybercrime against senior citizens: exploring ageism, ideal victimhood, and the pivotal role of socioeconomics
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) Lazarus, Suleman; Tickner, Peter; McGuire, Michael R.
We discuss cybercrimes against senior citizens from three standpoints: (a) online fraudsters often target senior citizens because of their age, which results in the propagation of ageism. Thus, we explicitly define ageism in the context of cybercrime, characterising it as the intentional targeting or prioritisation of senior citizens as potential victims of online fraud. (b) Senior citizens are vulnerable to online fraud schemes for physiological (e.g., cognitive decline), psychological (e.g., elevated fear of cybercrime), familial (e.g., insider fraud), and sociocultural (e.g., isolation) reasons. (c) Cybercrimes against older adults predominantly fall under the socioeconomic category driven by a common financial motive. We argue that ageism serves as a weapon used by online offenders to target older adults, whilst the concept of the ideal victim acts as society’s shield in response to these reprehensible actions. This framework invites closer attention to how age-based targeting in cyberspace reproduces broader social, economic, and moral asymmetries. Future empirical studies are warranted to substantiate these claims beyond the theoretical realm.
What is scholar-baiting? when the watcher is watched, and the social engineering attacks on scholars
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2025) Lazarus, Suleman
I write from the dual position of witness and analyst, using autoethnography to examine a scholar-targeted form of social engineering. The scammers baited me, mimicking academic language, citing published work, and deploying emotionally charged narratives to elicit trust and ethical engagement. From this dual role, I introduce two emergent constructs (“scholar-baiting” and “document staging”) to describe how epistemic trust and narrative craft are exploited in academic-facing fraud. Scholar-baiting is a sub-genre of spear phishing, defined as a narrative-based form of deception. Document staging, on the other hand, is a dramaturgical tactic in which realistic artefacts are embedded to simulate plausibility and suppress suspicion. I further theorise emotional enmeshment and symbolic entrapment as emerging risks for scholars whose work centres on harm, justice, and vulnerability. I conclude by proposing a framework of defensive scholarship that repositions cyber hygiene as a form of epistemic reflexivity. This framing recognises that scholars’ ethical commitments to engagement and vulnerability can be exploited as attack surfaces. By framing scholars as high-trust nodes in digital ecosystems, I highlight a threat to academic labour that remains under-theorised but urgently relevant.
Nigerian confraternities and mass cross-border fraud
(Springer, 2025) Lazarus, Suleman; Button, Mark; Hock, Branislav
Nigeria is well-known for its significant problem with criminal actors who commit industrial-scale online fraud and related crimes, predominantly targeting foreign nationals and businesses. However, the structures and characteristics of those involved remain less understood. A key area of debate concerns the degree of organization among these perpetrators and their affiliation with organized crime groups. A specific focus of this debate is the involvement of confraternities, such as Black Axe, originating from Nigerian universities. This paper will seek to offer a deeper assessment of the growing role of confraternities in organised fraud and how they utilise networks of members, often based in Western countries, to perpetrate fraud and launder money. The study argues that while the full extent of their involvement is challenging to ascertain, there is mounting evidence that confraternities play a significant role in cross-border fraud and money laundering operations in Western nations.
Making and remaking life under threat: fenceline communities in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga
(Routledge, 2025) Rabbaney, Zaakiyah
In fenceline communities alongside coal extraction operations in South Africa, residents experience extreme environmental, social and economic conditions that can be traced to the country’s extractivist economy and race-based capitalist logic that created informal settlements in abandoned landscapes to which abandoned people have been relegated. These dystopian spaces present the immortality of coal’s impacts, even in its obsolete post-industrial extraction state. Because of this destruction, in addition to a lack of basic services and mass unemployment and underemployment, individuals are forced into a perpetual cycle of making and remaking life, underpinned by the afterlives of industrial coal extraction, and aggravated by the state’s relegation of impoverished families, who cannot afford formal housing, to abandoned and forsaken spaces. This article illustrates the extent of the deleterious effects of systematic environmental devastation on people whose lives have been historically and systematically devastated, and the ways in which their efforts to make life under such circumstances all too often turn out simply to reinforce their marginality and extreme vulnerability.

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