Meta removes 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts over ‘sextortion’ scams 

The company disclosed this in a statement released on Wednesday titled: ‘Combating Financial Sextortion Scams from Nigeria.’ 

This announcement from Meta comes a few days after the Nigerian consumer protection authority, Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) slammed a $220 million fine against Meta and its instant messaging platform, WhatsApp over what it described as discriminatory practices against Nigerians. 

Sextortion refers to the practice of extorting money or sexual favours from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity. 

‘Yahoo Boys’ connection 

While noting that financial sextortion is a horrific crime that can have devastating consequences, Meta said 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 said it has 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 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 said. 

Meta added that is 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. 

Facebook accounts, pages, and groups removed 

Highlighting the second part of its activities in disrupting the scammers’ operations, Meta 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 those systems to make them as effective as possible.  

What you should know 

Per data from Statista, there were nearly 41.6 million Facebook users in Nigeria as of May 2023, which is 18.5% of the country’s population.  

Earlier this month, content creators from Nigeria could start earning money on Facebook starting from Monday, July 1, 2024, as it rolled out two monetization features. 

This came as fulfilment of the promise made to the Nigerian government in March this year when Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Sir Nick Clegg, led a delegation of Meta Platforms Incorporated to visit President Bola Tinubu at the State House in Abuja.