- Many Nigerian online scammers are involved in financial sexual extortion scams due to the challenging economy in the country
- Meta, Instagram has removed 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria suspected to be involved in sextortion
- The reported investigation revealed that many of the attempts were unsuccessful
Meta Platforms Inc. announced that it had removed about 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that attempted to engage in financial sexual extortion scams, which involved threatening people with the release of compromising photos, either real or fake, and demanding to be paid. This scam, sextortion, was mainly aimed at adult men in the United States.
The company announced in its Q1 2024 Adversarial Threat Report on July 24 that the removed accounts also included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 linked to a group of around 20 individuals.
Financial sextortion is a crime on Instagram
“Financial sextortion is a borderless crime, fuelled in recent years by the increased activity of Yahoo Boys, loosely organised cybercriminals operating largely out of Nigeria that specialise in different types of scams,” it stated.
“We’ve also removed a set of Instagram accounts, Pages, and groups run by Yahoo Boys banned under our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy that were attempting to organize, recruit and train new scammers,” the company explained.
It stated further that some accounts 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," it said.
Meanwhile, the company said it had used a combination of new technical signals developed to help identify sex extortion, and the investigation, which was reported to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the U.S., showed that the majority of the scammers' attempts were unsuccessful. Although their main targets are adults, there were also attempts against minors,
"They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities," Meta said.
Nigerian online fraudsters, popularly referred to as "Yahoo boys" or “419 scams”, are notorious for scams that range from passing themselves off as people in financial need to Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on investment. As Nigeria's economic hardships worsen, online scams have grown, with those behind them operating from university dormitories, shanty suburbs or affluent neighbourhoods.
Meta to cut metaverse budget by 20%
Meanwhile, TheRadar earlier reported that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp had announced plans to cut its budget for metaverse by 20%.
According to Bank of America analysts Justin Post and Nitin Bansal, Meta would save roughly $3 billion as a result of the cost-cutting measures.