About 63,000 Facebook profiles involved in financial sextortion schemes in Nigeria have been removed, according to Meta, along with pages and groups that attempted to recruit, teach, and coordinate new criminals.
Persuading someone to upload obscene photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or performs sexual favors is known as sexual extortion, or sextortion. Two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teenage boys and young men in Michigan—one of whom committed suicide—as well as a Virginia sheriff’s deputy who abducted and sexually abused a fifteen-year-old girl are two recent high-profile examples.
A loosely organized group known as the Yahoo Boys, which primarily operates out of Nigeria, has been implicated in a significant increase in sextortion cases in recent years, according to Meta, which also said that the group’s Facebook accounts and groups have been removed under its “dangerous organizations and individuals” policy.
The FBI issued a warning in January about a “huge increase” in child-targeted sextortion cases. Boys between the ages of 14 and 17 constitute the majority of the intended victims, but any child can fall victim, according to the FBI.
The bulk of the scammers’ attempts, according to Meta’s investigation, failed, and they primarily targeted adult men in the United States. However, Meta also noted that “some” of the scammers attempted to target kids, which it reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
According to Meta, among the deleted accounts was a “coordinated network” consisting of over 2,500 accounts, each connected to a group of roughly 20 individuals who managed them.
Meta stated in April that it was introducing new measures on Instagram to guard against sexual extortion and safeguard youth, one of which is an automatic feature that blurs nudity in direct messaging. As part of its campaign to combat sexual frauds and other forms of “image abuse,” as well as to make it more difficult for criminals to contact teenagers, Meta is now testing these features.
