Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has taken action against sextortion scams originating from Nigeria.
The company has removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts linked to these scams, including a coordinated network of 2,500 accounts traced to a group of 20 individuals.
The deleted accounts were used to target primarily adult men in the United States, with scammers using fake identities to persuade victims to provide explicit images. They would then threaten to release the images publicly unless the victims sent them money.
Meta also removed 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook Pages, and 5,700 Facebook Groups from Nigeria that were providing tips and resources for conducting scams. The company blamed the notorious “Yahoo Boys”, a slang term for internet fraudsters, for the scam accounts.
While most of the scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful, Meta explained that they have also targeted minors. A Homeland Security Investigation between October 2021 and March 2023 received 13,000 reports of financial sextortion involving 12,600 minors, mostly boys, in the United States. The scams have triggered at least 20 suicides, according to the FBI.
To combat the rising trend of sextortion, Meta announced in April that it was testing an AI-powered “nudity protection” feature in Instagram direct messages to protect teenagers. Two men were arrested in Nigeria the same month for attempting to extort an Australian teenager, leading to the boy’s suicide after being threatened.
The clampdown on the scam accounts came days after Nigerian authorities fined Meta $220 million for “multiple and repeated” data protection and consumer rights violations on Facebook and WhatsApp.
