Tech giant Meta said on Wednesday it had removed about 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that tried to defraud mostly men in the United States through financial sexual extortion scams.
“They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta said in a statement.
It explained that the accounts also made attempts against minors, which it reported to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the U.S.
Sexual extortion or “Sextortion”, romance scams and business email compromise (BEC) are common strategies by Nigerian online fraudsters, known as “Yahoo boys”.
Sextortion involves an online predator tricking someone into giving them nude images or videos, and then demanding money, more images, or making other demands —threatening to share the images with the victim’s friends and family if they don’t comply.
Meta said its investigation showed that most of the scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful.
The company said it had used a combination of new technical signals developed to help identify sex extortion.
Meta said 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.
The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services.
