Pastor Ibiyeomie’s Bold Sermon: Don’t Bring Stolen Money From Yahoo Fraud to My Church

In a video that has spread across social media, Pastor David Ibiyeomie of Salvation Ministries drew a line most church leaders avoid. He told parishioners engaged in “Yahoo” that their money was not welcome in his offering plates, recounting how one scam victim, a university professor consultant, lost all her savings and died after being defrauded. He then urged those involved to leave and find worship elsewhere.

The sermon has reignited a quiet tension in Nigerian churches: how to handle tithes and offerings from members whose income comes from internet fraud.

What Is Yahoo Fraud

“Yahoo” is West African slang for online romance scams and internet fraud schemes, named for the Yahoo email addresses that fraudsters once used to build intimate, often romantic relationships with their victims based on fake personas. The term has become so synonymous with fraud in Nigeria that it has become a charged word tied entirely to fraud, especially in poor neighborhoods of Lagos where scammers wear crisp clothes bought with money extracted from lonely Westerners.

The mechanics are straightforward and brutal. Fraudsters based in West Africa, especially Nigeria, con foreigners out of their life savings, building fake personas to deceive victims into sending money Romance scam losses totaled $1.14 billion in 2023, affecting more than 64,000 victims, with billions of dollars in losses flowing from Americans to scammers overseas, many preying on widowers looking for love and companionship.

The perpetrators are often younger than outsiders assume. Research of 50 convicted Nigerian romance scammers found that 74 percent were university students, not poorly educated individuals operating on instinct but young men choosing organized fraud as a parallel career.

Why Pastor Ibiyeomie Called It Stealing

In the Salvation Ministries video, Ibiyeomie quoted his sermon directly: “Y@hoo is stealing. If you’re in this church and you’re doing Y@hoo, please don’t give your offering here, go to another place.” His stance was unambiguous. He framed the issue not as a grey area of questionable income but as theft, the same category of sin that churches have condemned for centuries.

The pastor’s line in the sand comes amid ongoing debate within Nigerian religious communities about where to draw the boundary on tainted money. Some churches have quietly accepted offerings from defrauders without comment, treating the moral question as private between the giver and God. Others, like Ibiyeomie, have chosen public confrontation, especially after seeing the human cost.

The case he cited, a university professor consultant scammed of everything and later deceased, anchors the sermon in consequence. Ibiyeomie’s message was not abstract theology but a response to real suffering: somewhere, a woman lost her life savings to a scam orchestrated by someone sitting in a Lagos neighborhood, and the money that defrauder then tried to launder through a church offering.

The Larger Question About Church and Stolen Money

Ibiyeomie’s stance has drawn praise from viewers who saw it as moral clarity, but also questions about why politicians’ money or other problematic sources face less scrutiny, highlighting debates about consistent standards in churches. Others noted that calling out fraud in a sermon is easier than systemic change, particularly when economic desperation drives fraud in the first place.

The moment also reflects a broader shift in Nigerian churches toward engagement with cybercrime. As fraud has become a visible source of wealth in some neighborhoods, pastors have begun naming it directly rather than ignoring it, a sign that the problem has become too visible to treat as unspoken.