Sextortion scam: Meta deletes 70,000 social media accounts in Nigeria
Meta has removed 63,000 Instagram and more than 7,000 Facebook accounts in Nigeria that were linked to financial sexual blackmail attempts.
(Image: Michael Vi/Shutterstock.com)
The US company Meta has removed more than 70,000 social media accounts, including 63,000 Instagram accounts alone, in Nigeria that attempted to engage in financial sexual blackmail. The company announced this on Wednesday. The blackmail had mainly targeted adult men in the United States. It also removed 7,200 Facebook accounts, pages and groups offering tips for scams. "Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and tutorials that can be used in fraud and sharing links to photo collections that can be used to create fake accounts," Meta said. The company said it also removed a smaller coordinated network of about 2,500 accounts linked to a group of about 20 people.
Sexual blackmail, also known as "sextortion", involves threatening people with the publication of compromising real or fake photos if they do not pay for non-publication. Most attempts by the scammers have been unsuccessful , according to a report by the Reuters news agency. Although they usually targeted adults, there were also blackmail attempts against minors. Meta reported these to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a non-profit child protection organization founded by the U.S. Congress in the 1980s. Meta representatives stated that this was not the first time they had stopped such fraudulent networks. They had disclosed the current operation in order to "raise awareness".
Meta under pressure due to inadequate protection of minors
The social media company has come under fire in recent years with regard to the protection of children and young people. At the end of 2023, the US state of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Meta and its CEO and largest shareholder, Mark Zuckerberg. The allegation was that a large amount of child pornography and prostitution could be found on Facebook and Instagram. A few weeks earlier , 41 US states and the District of Columbia had filed a lawsuit against Meta. In it, the company was accused of contributing to mental health problems in young people, including depression, anxiety and insomnia, due to the addictive nature of its social media platforms.
On the other hand, the number of sextortion cases is on the rise. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently issued a warning about this. Artificial intelligence (AI) makes manipulation easier. As technology advances, it is becoming easier and easier to generate media content from situations that have never existed - the rapid development of AI tools makes this all the more possible.
In Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people with huge social and class divides, online scams have been on the rise in recent years, with those behind them operating from student dormitories, slums or affluent neighborhoods, according to Reuters. Nigeria's scammers are also known as "419 scammers" after the section of the national penal code that deals with fraud, it said. Another term for Nigerian online scammers is "yahoo boys" in reference to scam emails in which they pose as people in financial distress or as Nigerian princes promising excellent returns on an investment.
(akn)
