Sextortion Scams: Meta Delists 63,000 Nigerian Facebook Accounts

Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has said 63,000 Nigerian Facebook accounts have been deleted for allegedly trying to carry out financial extortion schemes.

This was disclosed by Meta in a statement titled ‘Combating Financial Sextortion Scams from Nigeria,’ on Wednesday.

This announcement from Meta coincides with the recent Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s fine of $220 million on Meta and its instant messaging service, WhatsApp, for what it claimed were discriminatory practices against Nigerians.

Sextortion is the act of extorting money or sexual favours from someone by threatening to expose any proof of their sexual behaviour.

Met stated that financial sextortion is a horrific crime that can have devastating consequences, adding there has been a growing trend of scammers “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 claims to have taken down two Nigerian account sets connected to Yahoo Boys that were seeking to carry out money extortion fraudulent activities.

“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,” it noted.

Meta stated that it also discovered the coordinated network of about 2,500 accounts through a mix of new technical signals it developed to help identify sextorters and in-depth examinations by our specialist teams.

According to social media company’s statement, the bulk of the accounts were identified and rendered inactive by its enforcement systems. The inquiry facilitated the removal of the remaining accounts and provided additional insights into the strategies employed to enhance its automated detection.

It added “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.”

As of May 2023, there were around 41.6 million Facebook members in Nigeria, or 18.5% of the total population, according to Statista data.