By Afolabi Samuel Odunayo
In its fight against cybercrime, Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, has announced the removal of 63,000 accounts in Nigeria for crimes related to sextortion.
Earlier on Wednesday, Meta released a report titled “Combating Financial Sextortion Scams From Nigeria,” where it detailed the disruption of two sets of accounts associated with ‘Yahoo Boys’ involved in these scams in Nigeria.
According to the report, Meta’s Q1 2024 Adversarial Threat Report prompted the strategic disruption.
Meta revealed: “We removed around 63,000 accounts in Nigeria that attempted to engage in financial sextortion scams.”
The report included a smaller network of about 2,500 accounts linked to 20 individuals targeting mainly adult men in the US using fake accounts.
According to reports, Meta’s new technical signals and in-depth investigations by expert teams helped identify the 2,500-account network.
The company said: “The majority of these accounts had already been detected and disabled by Meta’s enforcement systems,” Meta stated, explaining that such investigation allowed it to remove the remaining accounts and improve their automated detection techniques.
“The investigation also showed that while most scam attempts were unsuccessful and targeted adults, some accounts aimed at minors.
These were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).”
The company added:” 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.”
Furthermore, the organization noted that “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.”
Additionally, Meta removed 7,200 assets, including 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook pages, and 5,700 Facebook groups.
These assets, according to the report, were found selling scripts, guides for scamming, and links to collections of photos for fake accounts.
Following this disruption, Meta’s systems are now detecting and automatically blocking attempts by these groups to return. The company continues to enhance these systems to maintain their effectiveness., it maintained.
Meta which reiterated its commitment to supporting law enforcement by responding to legitimate legal information requests and notifying authorities if individuals are at immediate risk said in order to prevent such scams, it has introduced stricter message settings for teens, developed new signals to detect potential sextortion accounts, and started testing an on-device nudity protection feature in Instagram direct messages, which blurs detected nudity and provides safety tips and resources.
