Meta has removed approximately 63,000 Facebook accounts in Nigeria for attempting to engage in financial sextortion scams, primarily targeting adult men in the United States.
These scams, known as “sextortion,” involve threatening to release compromising photos, either real or fake, if the victim does not pay to stop them.
In a statement on Wednesday, Meta revealed that the removed accounts included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts linked to a group of about 20 individuals.
“They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta stated.
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Nigerian online fraudsters, often referred to as “Yahoo boys,” are notorious for various scams, including impersonating individuals in financial need or posing as Nigerian princes offering lucrative investment returns. Meta reported attempts against minors to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
The company utilized a combination of new technical signals developed to help identify sextortion attempts. Nigeria’s scammers gained notoriety through “419 scams,” named after the section of the criminal code that inadequately addressed fraud.
As economic hardships worsen in Nigeria, a country with over 200 million people, online scams have proliferated, with perpetrators operating from university dormitories, shanty suburbs, or affluent neighborhoods.
Meta indicated that some accounts provided tips for conducting scams.
“Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and guides to use when scamming people, and sharing links to collections of photos to use when populating fake accounts,” Meta said.
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Section 419 is of the Criminal Code, not Penal code.