Meta suspends 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria engaged in sextortion

Meta Platforms has removed about 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that it alleged were engaged in financial sexual extortion scams, mostly in the United States.

The firm has also removed 72,00 Facebook accounts, Pages and Groups run by Yahoo Boys – banned under its  "Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy". 

"Yahoo boys" are notorious for financial scams that involve at times posing as Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on an investment.

The company also took down a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 that were linked to a group of around 20 individuals.

"The majority of these accounts had already been detected and disabled by our enforcement systems, and this investigation allowed us to remove the remaining accounts and understand more about the techniques being used to improve our automated detection," Meta said in a press statement. 

The company said a majority of the scammers' attempts were unsuccessful and though they mostly targeted adults, there were also attempts against minors. Meta reported these instances to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

"Second, we removed around 7,200 assets, including 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook Pages and 5,700 Facebook Groups, also based in Nigeria, that were providing 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.

The tech giant has become more proactive in taking on malicious actors on its platforms in the wake of the federal government's crackdown on social media apps, resulting in several hearings. 

Also read: Big tech CEOs face music in US Senate hearing on child sex abuse, Zuckerberg turns to families to apologise

In a hearing earlier this year, top executives of five big social media firms faced a severe grilling when they appeared for questioning before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on the issue of child exploitation content that their portals have been found to be hosting.

One lawmaker accused Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top bosses of having "blood on their hands" for failing to protect children from threats of sexual predation on their apps.

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