Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has announced that it has removed 63,000 Instagram accounts belonging to Nigerians suspected to be associated with the notorious cybercriminals, “Yahoo Boys” scam group.
The company made the announcement recently in a release on its website titled: ‘Combating Financial Sextortion Scams from Nigeria’. It also said that the accounts were used for financial sextortion scams and distributing blackmail scripts.
Sextortion refers to the practice of extorting money or sexual favours from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity. The company noted that financial sextortion is a horrific crime that can have devastating consequences.
Meta who explained that there has been a growing trend of scammers said, “Largely driven by cybercriminals known as Yahoo Boys targeting people across the internet, both with these and other types of scams.”
“We’ve banned Yahoo Boys 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,” it stated.
The company said it had disrupted two sets of accounts in Nigeria that were affiliated with Yahoo Boys and were attempting to engage in financial sextortion scams.
“First, we removed around 63,000 accounts in Nigeria that attempted to engage in financial sextortion scams directly.
“These included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts that we could link to a group of around 20 individuals. They targeted primarily adult men in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” it said.
Meta added that it also found the coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts through a combination of new technical signals it developed to help identify sextorters and in-depth investigations by our expert teams.
According to the social media company, the majority of the accounts had already been detected and disabled by its enforcement systems, and this investigation allowed it to remove the remaining accounts and understand more about the techniques being used to improve its automated detection.
The company highlighted the second part of its activities in disrupting the scammers’ operations. It said, “Second, we removed around 7,200 assets, including 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook Pages, and 5,700 Facebook Groups, also based in Nigeria, that were providing tips for conducting scams.
“Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and guides to use when scamming people, and sharing links to collections of photos to use when populating fake accounts.”
According to the company, since this disruption, its systems have been identifying and automatically blocking attempts from these groups to come back. It continues to strengthen the systems to make them as effective as possible.
Last week, Meta was fined $220 million by the Nigerian consumer protection authority, Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) for multiple violations of data protection laws and discriminatory practices against Nigerians linked to its instant messaging platform, WhatsApp.