Meta announced on Wednesday that it had erased 63,000 Instagram accounts tied to s*xtortion scams from Nigeria, just days after authorities in the West African country fined the firm $220 million.
The deleted accounts constituted a network of 2,500 personas linked to a group of 20 individuals.
The country’s 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook Pages, and 5,700 Facebook Groups were also banned for “providing tips for conducting scams”.
Gangs conduct s*xtortion scams by impersonating members of the opposite s8x and convincing people to share s*xual photographs of themselves, then threatening to reveal them to the public unless their victims send them money.
“They targeted primarily adult men in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta said in a statement.
It blamed “Yahoo Boys”, a slang for internet fraudsters, for the scam accounts.
The social media giant explained that while the majority of the attempts by scammers were unsuccessful and mostly focused on adult victims, they have also targeted minors.
A Homeland Security Investigation between October 2021 and March 2023 received 13,000 reports of financial s*xtortion involving 12,600 minors, mostly boys, in the United States.
The scams triggered at least 20 suicides, according to the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
“Offenders who engage in financially motivated s*xtortion are often located outside the United States—primarily in west African countries such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, or Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines,” FBI said in a statement in January.
To combat the rising spate of the crime, Meta announced in April that it was testing an AI-powered “n*dity protection” feature in Instagram direct messages to protect teenagers.
Two men were arrested in Nigeria the same month for trying to extort an Australian teenager by threatening to release “personal photos of the boy” if he did not pay them 500 Australian dollars ($330).
Australian police said the boy had killed himself after being threatened by the suspects in the alleged “s*xtortion” scam.
Meta said it is also working with law enforcement agencies in the investigation and prosecution of the alleged crimes.
The clampdown on the scam accounts came days after Nigerian authorities fined the Facebook parent company for “multiple and repeated” data violations.
The country’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) on Friday accused Meta of violating the country’s data protection and consumer rights laws on Facebook and WhatsApp.
