“So where do you work now?” Nii Kwei asked Isaac, his conversational tone belying his curiosity.

“Internet stuff, you know,” Isaac said.

“No, I don’t know. What kind of Internet stuff?”

“Like overseas business.”

The glint of the giant gold chain on Isaac’s wrist caught Nii Kwei’s eye and held it for a moment. “Come on, Isaac,” he said in Ga. Switching to the vernacular always helped. “We were mates, so be straight with me. What are you doing?”

Isaac glanced around as if someone might be watching them, or maybe it was just a dramatic flourish. “Okay, let’s sit inside my car and talk.”

My God, Nii thought as he got in. He ran his fingers over the precisely stitched tan leather seats and stared at the Lexus’s high-tech dashboard, which looked like an airplane cockpit and came with a navigation system. Why can’t I have this luxury too?

In the bliss of the Lexus’s air conditioning, Isaac told Nii about the world of sakawa—Internet fraud with the backing of magical powers that could make you enormously successful at making money through several scams. You accessed magical powers through an intermediary like a traditional priest, aka fetish priest. It used to be people went to a man of God—either a Christian pastor or a mallam—to request those powers, but either the MOG or God Himself was slow because the magic took too long to materialize. Fetish priests were fast. They jumped on the project immediately, and before you knew it, the sakawa boy was up and away like a racehorse.

But the price the fetish exacted from his supplicant was high. Sacrificing a couple of chickens to the gods was standard, but that was the easy part. The difficulty came with the more exotic rituals the fetish might demand of the sakawa boy. Certain items were highly treasured by the gods, and if a sakawa boy truly desired any modicum of success, he needed to bring those to the priest. The most prized offerings included the hair of either an oburoni or an albino, the thighbone of a child, a person’s lips, and male or female genitalia. The best way to procure these body parts was to have an arrangement with someone at the mortuary in a large hospital.

Isaac detailed how one of his fetish priests asked him to have sex with three different women every day for a week and provide video evidence. Failure to obey the fetish could result in an instant loss of income, sickness, death, or all the above.

“But how do you actually make money?” Nii asked Isaac. “Is it like the 419?”

In the infamous “419” scams, a made-up Nigerian oil tycoon emails you and promises you a percentage of millions of dollars if you send him a mere $5,000.

“That’s the one everyone knows,” Isaac said with a smile. “Nigerians invented it and it still works, but Ghanaians have taken it to a new, higher level and we’re now better at it than they are. We have several techniques now.”