Meta deletes 63,000 Nigerian accounts linked to sextortion scams

Meta, parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, says it has removed 63,000 accounts in Nigeria linked to sextortion scams.

In its report ‘Combating Financial Sextortion Scams From Nigeria’ released on Wednesday, Meta announced the network disruption of two sets of accounts in Nigeria affiliated with ‘yahoo boys’ and involved in financial sextortion scams.

“Following our recent Q1 2024 Adversarial Threat Report, today we are announcing the strategic network disruption of two sets of accounts in Nigeria that were affiliated with Yahoo Boys and were attempting to engage in financial sextortion scams,” Meta said.

“First, we removed around 63,000 accounts in Nigeria that attempted to directly engage in financial sextortion scams.

“These included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts that we were able to link to a group of around 20 individuals. They targeted primarily adult men in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities.

“We found the coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts through a combination of new technical signals we’ve developed to help identify sextorters and in-depth investigations by our expert teams.

“The majority of these accounts had already been detected and disabled by our enforcement systems, and this investigation allowed us to remove the remaining accounts and understand more about the techniques being used to improve our automated detection.”

The company said the investigation revealed that while the majority of these scam attempts were unsuccessful and focused on adults, some accounts targeted minors.

It, however, said these accounts were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

“Since these criminals don’t limit themselves to any one platform, we also share relevant information with other tech companies through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program, so they can take action too,” it added.

“Applying lessons learned from taking down terrorist groups and coordinated inauthentic behavior, we used our identification of this coordinated network to help us identify more accounts in Nigeria that were attempting to engage in similar sextortion scams, bringing the total to around 63,000 accounts removed.”

Meta said in addition to these accounts, 7,200 assets were removed including 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook pages, and 5,700 Facebook groups.

It said these assets were found offering to sell scripts and guides to use when scamming people, and sharing links to collections of photos to use when populating fake accounts.  

The company said following this disruption, its systems have been detecting and automatically blocking any attempts by these groups to return, and it is continually enhancing these systems to ensure their effectiveness.

‘META COMMITTED TO INVESTIGATING THESE CRIMES’

Meta reiterated its commitment to ongoing support for law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting these crimes by responding to legitimate legal information requests and notifying authorities if it identifies individuals at immediate risk, in line with its terms of service and relevant laws.

In efforts to prevent such scams, Meta said it has introduced stricter message settings for teens, developed new signals to detect potential sextortion accounts, and started testing an on-device nudity protection feature in Instagram direct messages (DMs), which blurs images with nudity detected as containing nudity and provides safety tips and resources.