Meta Platforms on Wednesday said it took steps to remove around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that were found to target people with 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," the company said . "They targeted primarily adult men in the U.
S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities." In cases where some of these accounts attempted to target minors, Meta said it reported them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Separately, Meta said it also removed 7,200 assets, including 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook Pages and 5,700 Facebook Groups, based in Nigeria that were used to organize, recruit and train new scammers. "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. Meta attributed the second cluster to a cybercrime group tracked as Yahoo Boys , which came under the radar earlier this year for orchestrating financial sextortion attacks targeting teenagers from Australia, Canada, and the U.
S. A subsequent report from Bloomberg exposed sextortion-fueled suicides, revealing how scammers are posing as teenage girls on Instagram and Snapchat to lure targets and entice them into sending explicit photos, which are then used to blackmail victims in exchange for money or risk getting their images .
