On Wednesday, Meta announced a major action against a known sextortion group based in Nigeria. With this action, Meta removed 63,000 Instagram accounts. They remove around 70,000 cumulative profiles, Pages, and groups from Facebook and IG.
With this, they also announced the measures they will take to keep them from returning to the platform.
Meta emphasized that these accounts were linked to a group called “Yahoo Boys,” a known scam group. This group was originally doing a “Nigerian Prince” type of scam. With this scam, they’d offer riches to people and dupe them instead.
However, in recent times, they’ve evolved their scam and switched to romance scams. Here they create fake profiles, then convince their targets to share money and/or personal details to maintain the relationship.
Sometimes, they’d ask for intimate images, which they used to extort money from their victims.
This group has been highly active, especially on Instagram.
Here is a statement from Meta about the removal of accounts.
“We removed around 63,000 Instagram 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.”
63000 profiles, a big number that was used to intimidate their targets through a coordinated effort.
Apart from this, Meta also mentions that they’ve detected a coordinated network of around 2500 accounts through a combination of new technical signals and processes.
“The majority of these accounts had already been detected and disabled by our enforcement systems, and this investigation allowed us to remove the remaining accounts and understand more about the techniques being used to improve our automated detection.”
In conclusion, Meta has used this exercise to learn about the way these types of scams take place and how to stop them from happening.
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