Meta deletes 1,600 accounts linked to ‘Yahoo Boys’

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, says it has deleted another 1,600 groups linked to ‘Yahoo Boys’ from its platform.

The development comes three months after the company removed 63,000 accounts in Nigeria linked to sextortion scams.

In a statement on Thursday, Meta also announced that Instagram is taking measures to further protect people from sextortion.

“We removed around 1,600 Facebook Groups and accounts that were affiliated with Yahoo Boys, and were attempting to organize, recruit and train new scammers,” Meta said.

“This comes after we announced in July that we’d removed around 7,200 Facebook assets that were engaging in similar behaviour.

“Yahoo Boys are banned 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.

“While we’ve been removing violating Yahoo Boys accounts for years, we’re putting new processes in place which will allow us to identify and remove these accounts more quickly.”

MEASURES TO PREVENT SCAMS

Meta said it has put measures to prevent the activities of scammers.

This, the firm said, includes hiding follower and following lists from potential sextortion scammers, preventing screenshots of certain images in direct messages (DMs), and rolling out our nudity protection feature globally.

“These updates, which are part of a campaign informed by NCMEC, Thorn & Childnet, also aim to help parents feel more equipped to support their teens in avoiding these scams,” Meta said.

“Sextortion is a horrific crime, where financially-driven scammers target young adults and teens around the world, threatening to expose their intimate imagery if they don’t get what they want.

“Today, we’re announcing new measures in our fight against these criminals – including new safety features to further help prevent sextortion on our apps, building on protections already in place.”

To further protect people from sextortion and make it difficult for criminals to succeed, the Meta said, “we’re making it harder for accounts showing signals of potentially scammy behavior to request to follow teens”.

“Depending on the strength of these signals – which include how new an account is – we’ll either block the follow request completely, or send it to a teen’s spam folder,” the company added.

Meta also said sextortion scammers often use the following and follower lists of their targets to try and blackmail them.

The company said potential scammers would be unable to see people’s follower or following lists, accounts that have liked someone’s posts, or other accounts that have been tagged in their photos.