Meta said Wednesday it had removed about 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that were attempting to engage in “sextortion” scams, mostly aimed at adult men and some children in the US.
The fraudsters were engaging in “sextortion” schemes on Instagram and Facebook in which they threatened to reveal users’ sexual photos or messages unless they received payment.
Within those 63,000 accounts, Meta said it identified a network of 2,500 accounts run by a group of 20 individuals who “targeted primarily adult men in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities.”
The majority of the sextortion attempts were unsuccessful, Meta said.
While most of the scammers targeted adult men, some of the sextortion attempts were aimed at children, which Meta said it reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The company clampdown on sextortion schemes comes after a South Carolina lawmaker’s son fatally shot himself in 2022 after a scammer tricked him into sending nude photographs via Instagram and then threatened to release the photos unless they received payment.
Another teen — 17-year-old football and basketball star Jordan DeMay — committed suicide after falling victim to a sextortion scheme on Instagram.
Local police and the FBI tracked the schemers to Nigeria and extradited the two young men to the US, where they pleaded guilty in April.
The FBI says sextortion is one of the fastest-growing crimes targeting children in the US.
Nigerian “Yahoo boys” target users across the internet, known for their schemes that offer investments with incredible returns.
The nickname is a reference to the Yahoo email service launched in the late 1990s.
Nigerian scammers are also often called 419 scammers, a nod to the Nigerian criminal code that handles fraud.
Meta previously banned Yahoo boys in its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Policy, and has been taking steps to identify the fraudsters more easily.
In addition to removing the Instagram accounts, Meta took down 5,700 Facebook groups, 1,300 Facebook accounts and 200 Facebook pages that were providing tips to scammers.
“Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and guides to use when scamming people, and sharing links to collections of photos to use when populating fake accounts,” Meta said in a statement.
Meta — headed by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg — announced earlier this year that it has developed new signals to automatically identify accounts that may be engaging in sextortion schemes.
Meta said it has taken unspecified steps to prevent these scam accounts from interacting with teens.
The company said it has started testing a new feature that detects and blurs images that seem to contain nudity sent via Instagram direct messages. This policy is meant to “encourage people to be cautious when sending sensitive images,” Meta said.
The company said its automatic identification of scam accounts has continued since the mass amount of Nigeria-based accounts were shut down.
“Since this disruption, our systems have been identifying and automatically blocking attempts from these groups to come back,” Meta said, “and we continue to strengthen those systems to make them as effective as possible.”
With Post wires
