Socioeconomic Lifestyles of the Yahoo-Boys: A Study of Perceptions of University Students in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, youths involved in cyber crime, generally known as the yahoo-boys, have been widely recognized as maintaining a distinctive lifestyle that confers a unique and/or a notorious identity on them in the society. Against this background, this paper examined the perceptions of students of some selected universities on the socioeconomic lifestyles of students involved in cyber crime. Multi-stage sampling technique was employed for the selection of respondents; data was collected through questionnaire and focus group discussion methods. Findings revealed that, though the majority of the respondents (59.5%) described the financial strengths of Nigerian university students involved in cyber crime as huge, many of them however, perceived this group of students to be extravagant. A large proportion of the respondents (62.5%) equally believed that the perpetration of cyber crime negatively affects the academic performance of students involved in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]