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.”
