Facebook parent Meta (META) said on Wednesday that it has removed thousands of Instagram accounts linked to so-called sextortion scams.
In a blog post, the company detailed how it pulled 63,000 accounts, including a network of 2,500 accounts run by some 20 individuals, attempting to commit the financially motivated scams.
According to Meta the accounts are affiliated with a group known as Yahoo Boys — no affiliation with this website — a loose collection of cybercriminals that largely operate out of Nigeria focusing on financial scams.
These scammers mostly targeted adult men in the US. But Meta said they also tried to target minors, leading the company to report the matter to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
In sextortion scams, the bad actors generally reach out to a massive number of users across social networks in the hopes of getting victims to respond — and strike up phony romantic relationships.
Over the course of their correspondences, the scammers will request nude photos or videos of the victims, which they then say they will release to friends and family or the broader internet if the victim doesn’t pay what can be hundreds of dollars in ransom.
While Meta said its automated systems detected the majority of the scam accounts before they could do any damage, it used other investigative methods to find the remaining accounts and take them offline as well.
According to Meta’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, the company is going public to help drive awareness of these types of scams. What’s more, she said, Meta also wants criminals to know that they’re picking up on these crimes and actively taking steps to block them.
Sextortion has become a growing threat in recent years, with the FBI warning about the crime in 2023 and again this year. In 2023, two Nigerian men suspected of running sextortion schemes that led to the suicide of a 17-year-old from Michigan were extradited to the US to face charges for the alleged crimes.
In March 2024, a third person was ordered to be extradited to the US by a Nigerian court, though he is challenging the move. The original suspects pleaded guilty in April.
In addition to the 63,000 Instagram accounts, Meta said it also took down 7,200 assets from Facebook, including 1,300 accounts, 200 pages, and 5,700 groups based in Nigeria dedicated to providing tips on scamming people — plus scripts to use on victims and photos to create fake accounts.
Beyond removing the accounts, Meta says it is also providing features to help prevent users from falling for sextortion scams, including on-device nudity protection, which automatically blurs images containing nudity in Instagram direct messages.
There are a few ways users can recognize some of the signs of potential sextortion scammers. The most obvious is getting a message from someone you’ve never spoken to before who seems to be trying to connect with you via direct messages without any prompting. Another sign is a message from someone including an image and asking for one in return.
Meta says it also has technology that can determine if an account is exhibiting scammy or suspicious behavior and will notify users who interact with it that it may be a scam account.
Email Daniel Howley at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley.
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