Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, said it has removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria attempting to target people with financial sextortion scams, including a coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts.
The company made this known in a publication titled “Combating Financial Sextortion Scams From Nigeria” on Wednesday, July 24, 2024.
It said “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 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.
“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.
“While our investigation showed that the majority of these scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful and mostly targeted adults, we did see some also attempt to target minors, and we’ve reported those accounts to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
“Since these criminals don’t limit themselves to any one platform, we also share relevant information with other tech companies through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program, so they can take action too.
“Applying lessons learned from taking down terrorist groups and coordinated inauthentic behavior, we used our identification of this coordinated network to help us identify more accounts in Nigeria that were attempting to engage in similar sextortion scams, bringing the total to around 63,000 accounts removed.
“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.
“Since this disruption, our systems have been identifying and automatically blocking attempts from these groups to come back, and we continue to strengthen those systems to make them as effective as possible. We’ve also used the new tactics we observed to further improve our ability to detect accounts, Groups and Pages engaging in this activity.
According to Meta, “We also recently announced that we’ve developed new signals to identify accounts that are potentially engaging in sextortion, and are taking steps to help prevent these accounts from finding and interacting with teens.
“Finally, we’ve started testing our on-device nudity protection feature in Instagram DMs, which will blur images detected as containing nudity, encourage people to be cautious when sending sensitive images and direct people to safety tips and resources, including NCMEC’s Take It Down platform.”
