Meta announced on Wednesday that it had removed about 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts that were operating a “sex blackmail” scam targeting mostly adult men and some children in the United States.
Scammers used “sextortion” tactics on Instagram and Facebook, threatening to make explicit sexual photos and messages to users unless they received payment.
Among those 63,000 accounts, Mehta said he had identified a network of 2,500 accounts. The attack was run by a group of 20 people who “primarily targeted adult males in the United States, using fake accounts to hide their identities,” the report said.
Mehta said most sextortion attempts were unsuccessful.
While most of the scammers targeted adult men, some of the sexual blackmail was aimed at children, which Mehta said he reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The company’s crackdown on sex blackmail comes after the son of a South Carolina state legislator shot himself in 2022 after scammers tricked him into sending nude photos of himself via Instagram and threatened to make the photos public if he didn’t receive payment.
Another teenager, 17-year-old football and basketball star Jordan DeMay, committed suicide after the fall. Victims of sextortion On Instagram.
Local police and the FBI tracked the perpetrators to Nigeria and extradited the two young men to the United States, where they pleaded guilty in April.
The FBI says Sexual assault is one of the fastest growing crimes It targets American children.
Nigerian “Yahoo Boys” are known for targeting users on the internet with schemes offering incredibly lucrative investments.
The nickname comes from Yahoo’s email service, which launched in the late 1990s.
Nigerian scammers are often also called 419 scammers, after the Nigerian penal code that deals with fraud.
Meta has previously banned Yahoo Boys under its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy and has taken steps to more easily identify scammers.
In addition to removing the Instagram accounts, Meta also removed 5,700 Facebook groups, 1,300 Facebook accounts, and 200 Facebook pages that were providing tips to scammers.
“Their activity included offering to sell scripts and guides to use in scamming people, as well as sharing links to photo collections to use in creating fake accounts,” Mehta said in a statement.
Meta, led by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, said earlier this year that it had developed new signals to automatically identify accounts that may be involved in sextortion scams.
Meta said it has taken specific steps to prevent these fraudulent accounts from interacting with teenagers.
The company said it has begun testing a new feature that will detect and blur images sent in Instagram direct messages that appear to contain nudity. The policy is intended to “encourage people to be careful when sending sensitive images,” Mehta said.
The company said it continues to automatically identify fraudulent accounts since the large number of Nigerian-based accounts were shut down.
“Since this disruption, our systems have been identifying and automatically blocking any attempts by these groups to return,” Mehta said. “We continue to strengthen these systems to make them as effective as possible.”
With post wire
