Meta said on Wednesday it had removed 63,000 Instagram accounts linked to a sextortion scandal in Nigeria, days after authorities in the West African country fined the company $220 million.
The accounts removed included a network of 2,500 profiles linked to a group of 20 people.
Nearly 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook pages and 5,700 Facebook groups operating from the country were also removed for “suggesting the operation of scams”.
The gangs run sextortion scams by pretending to be members of the opposite sex and persuading people to provide explicit photographs of themselves and then threatening to make them public if their victims do not send them money.
“They primarily targeted adult men in the US and used fake accounts to conceal their identities,” Meta said in a statement.
It blamed “yahoo boys”, a Nigerian term for internet fraudsters, for the scam.
The social media giant reported that although most of the scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful and focused mostly on adult victims, they also targeted minors.
Between October 2021 and March 2023, Homeland Security Investigations received 13,000 reports of financial sextortion involving 12,600 minors, mostly boys, in the United States.
According to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), these scams caused at least 20 suicides.
“Offenders involved in financially motivated sexual exploitation are often located outside of the United States — primarily in West African countries, such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, or Southeast Asian countries, such as the Philippines,” the FBI said in a statement in January.
To tackle the rising incidence of crime, Meta announced in April that it was testing an AI-powered “nudity protection” feature in Instagram Direct Messages to protect teens.
That same month, two men were arrested in Nigeria after they tried to extort an Australian teenager, threatening to release “private photos of the boy” unless he paid 500 Australian dollars ($330).
Australian police said the boy committed suicide after being threatened by suspects in an alleged “sextortion” scam.
Meta said it was also working with law enforcement agencies in the investigation and prosecution of the alleged crimes.
The crackdown on scam accounts comes days after Nigerian authorities fined Facebook’s parent company for “multiple and repeated” data breaches.
The country’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) on Friday accused Facebook and WhatsApp over Meta of violating the country’s data protection and consumer rights laws.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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