Meta says it has removed approximately 63,000 accounts involved in financial sextortion fraud, along with Facebook groups and pages that attempted to organize, recruit and train new scammers.
Meta says it has removed approximately 63,000 Facebook accounts in Nigeria that were involved in financial sextortion fraud, along with groups and pages that attempted to organize, recruit and train new scammers.
Sexual extortion, or sextortion, involves persuading someone to post explicit photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or provides sexual favors. Recent high-profile cases include: two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teenage boys and young men in Michigan, including one who committed suicide, and a Virginia sheriff’s deputy who sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15 year old girl.
There has been a marked increase in sextortion cases in recent years, fueled in part by a loosely organized group called the Yahoo Boys, which operates primarily out of Nigeria, Meta said, adding that it has removed Facebook accounts and groups run by the group under its “dangerous organizations and individuals” policy.
In January, the FBI warned of a “huge increase” in sextortion cases that target children. The intended victims are primarily boys between the ages of 14 and 17, but the FBI said any child could be a victim.
Meta said its investigation found that most of the scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful and that they mainly targeted adult males in the US, but added that it did “have some” try to target minorswhich Meta says she reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The deleted accounts included a “coordinated network” of about 2,500 accounts linked to a group of about 20 people who controlled them, Meta said.
In April, Meta announced that it new tools on Instagram to protect young people and combat sexual extortion, including a feature that automatically blurs nudity in direct messages. Meta is still testing the features as part of its campaign to combat sex scams and other forms of “image abuse” and make it harder for criminals to contact teens.