Meta deletes 63,000 Nigerian accounts linked to sextortion scams

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, has announced the removal of 63,000 accounts in Nigeria connected to sextortion scams.

In its report titled “Combating Financial Sextortion Scams From Nigeria,” released on Wednesday, July 24, Meta revealed that it has disrupted two networks of accounts associated with ‘yahoo boys,’ a term used for individuals involved in online financial scams. These accounts were found to be engaged in financial sextortion schemes.

It read;

“Following our recent Q1 2024 Adversarial Threat Report, today we are announcing the strategic network disruption of 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.

“We found the coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts through a combination of new technical signals we’ve developed to help identify sextorters and in-depth investigations by our expert teams.

“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.”