Meta Platforms Inc. removed 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria linked to scammers who were using its social media services to blackmail targets after soliciting intimate photos, the company said Wednesday.
Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, added that it had deleted thousands of additional Facebook accounts, pages and groups that were sharing scripts on how to blackmail and sexually extort users.
The mass removal took place at the end of May — six weeks after a Bloomberg Businessweek story on the rapid rise of financial sextortion in the US. The crime involves scammers posing as teenage girls on Instagram or Snap Inc.’s Snapchat to coerce their targets into sending nude photos. Those explicit images are then used to blackmail the targets, with the perpetrators threatening to forward the images to friends and family.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation says sextortion is one of the fastest-growing crimes targeting children in the US. More than two dozen minors, mainly teen boys, have killed themselves after falling victim to it since late 2021. Businessweek’s April cover story focused on the self-inflicted death of Jordan DeMay, a 17-year-old football and basketball star from Marquette, Michigan. After DeMay was goaded to suicide over Instagram, local police and the FBI tracked his blackmailers to Lagos, Nigeria, and extradited two young men to the US to face wrongful death charges. They pleaded guilty in April.
The explosion of financial sextortion in recent years has been linked to the Yahoo Boys, a loosely affiliated group of digitally savvy con men who design scams en masse. Meta said many of the Facebook pages and groups that it removed were affiliated with members of the Yahoo Boys, who were attempting to “organize, recruit and train new scammers.”
The groups were selling blackmail scripts and scam guides. They were also sharing links to photos that could be used to legitimize fake accounts. One network of 20 individuals was running 2,500 “fake accounts to mask their identities” that were mainly targeting men in the US, according to Meta.
“Financial sextortion is a horrific crime that can have devastating consequences,” Meta said in the statement. Its investigation found the majority of the scammers’ attempts failed. In cases where blackmailers targeted minors, Meta said it reported them to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “This is an adversarial space where criminals evolve to evade our ever-improving defenses,” the company said. “We will continue to focus on understanding how they operate so we can stay one step ahead.”
Meta has taken additional measures to better protect users against sextortion scams, including setting stricter message settings on teen accounts, sending sextortion-focused safety notices, and initially blurring nude photos sent or received by minors. (Bloomberg)
