Meta said on Wednesday it had taken down about 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that were trying to engage in “breakup” scams, mostly aimed at grown men and some children in the US.
Fraudsters were engaging in “extortion” schemes on Instagram and Facebook, in which they threatened to reveal users’ photos or sexual messages unless they received payment.
Within those 63,000 accounts, Meta said it identified a network of 2,500 accounts run by a group of 20 individuals who “primarily targeted male adults in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities.”
Most attempts at sex were unsuccessful, Meta said.
While most of the scammers targeted adult men, some of the sex attempts targeted children, which Meta said she reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The company’s crackdown on sextortion schemes comes after the son of a South Carolina lawmaker shot himself to death in 2022 after a scammer tricked him into sending nude photos via Instagram and then threatened to publish the photos if he didn’t. they received the payment.
Another teenager – 17-year-old football and basketball star Jordan DeMay – committed suicide after falling victim to a sex scheme on Instagram.
Local police and the FBI traced the schemes to Nigeria and extradited the two young men to the US, where they pleaded guilty in April.
The FBI says child abuse is one of the fastest growing crimes against children in the US.
Nigerian “Yahoo boys” target users all over the internet, known for their schemes that offer investment with incredible returns.
The nickname is a reference to the Yahoo email service launched in the late 1990s.
Nigerian fraudsters are also called 419 fraudsters, a nod to the Nigerian penal code that deals with fraud.
Meta previously banned the Yahoo guys in its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Policy and has taken steps to identify scammers more easily.
In addition to taking down Instagram accounts, Meta destroyed 5,700 Facebook groups, 1,300 Facebook accounts and 200 Facebook pages that provided tips for scammers.
“Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and guides to use when scamming people and sharing links to photo collections to use when populating fake accounts,” Meta said in a statement.
Meta — headed by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg — announced earlier this year that it has developed new signals to automatically identify accounts that may be involved in sexting schemes.
Meta said it has taken unspecified steps to prevent these scam accounts from interacting with teenagers.
The company said it has begun testing a new feature that detects and blurs images that appear to contain nudity sent via direct messages on Instagram. The policy is meant to “encourage people to be careful when sending sensitive images,” Meta said.
The company said its automatic identification of fraudulent accounts has been ongoing since the bulk of the Nigerian-based accounts were closed.
“Since this outage, our systems have automatically identified and blocked attempts by these groups to come back,” Meta said, “and we continue to harden those systems to make them as effective as possible.”
By postal wire
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