Meta, the social networking behemoth, stated on Wednesday that it had removed thousands of accounts linked to Nigerian criminality that were seeking to target users in the United States with financial sextortion scams.
The company confirmed removing 63,00 accounts linked to sextortion scams from its platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram on its official website.
Sexual extortion, often known as sextortion, is the practice of enticing someone to transmit graphic photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or does sexual favours.
Recent high-profile incidents include two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teenage boys and young men in Michigan, one of whom committed suicide, and a Virginia sheriff’s officer who sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl.
“We’ve banned Yahoo Boys under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy — one of our strictest policies — which means we remove Yahoo Boys’ accounts engaged in this criminal activity whenever we become aware of them,” it stated.
The company also asserted that it found and disabled these accounts using advanced technical signals and rigorous investigations, which improved its automatic detection systems.
Meta reported in its Q1 2024 Adversarial Threat Report on Wednesday that the terminated accounts included a smaller coordinated network of roughly 2,500 accounts tied to a group of about 20 people.
It added, “We’ve removed around 63,000 accounts in Nigeria attempting to target people with financial sextortion scams, including a coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts.”
“We’ve also removed a set of Facebook accounts, pages, and groups run by Yahoo Boys—banned under our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy—that were attempting to organize, recruit and train new scammers.”
Antigone Davis, Meta’s worldwide head of safety, went on to say that while the majority of the efforts were unsuccessful, there were some allegations involving children, which were forwarded to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
“While our investigation showed that the majority of these scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful and mostly targeted adults, we did see some attempts to target minors,” David said.
We earlier reported that Meta has been fined $220 million by the Nigerian government for allegedly breaking local consumer, data protection, and privacy laws.
