Meta, on Wednesday, announced that it had taken down approximately 63,000 Nigerian Facebook accounts attempting to engage in financial sexual extortion scams targeting adult men in the United States.
The parent company of Facebook disclosed in a statement that the deactivated accounts also included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 that were linked to a group of around 20 individuals, Reuters reported.
“They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta said.
Nigerian online fraudsters, commonly known as ‘Yahoo Boys’, are notorious for scams that range from passing themselves off as people in financial need, Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on investment, or even disguised men and women seeking to find true love with foreigners, amongst others.
In sexual extortion, or “sextortion”, people are threatened with the release of compromising photos, either real or fake, if they do not pay to stop them.
The investigation showed that the majority of the scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful and although mostly targeting adults, there were also attempts against minors, which Meta reported to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States.
The company said it had used a combination of new technical signals developed to help identify sex extortion.
Nigeria’s scammers had been known as “419 scams” after the section of the national penal code that dealt ineffectively with fraud.
However, as economic hardships tighten in the country of more than 200 million people, online scams have grown, with those behind them operating from university dormitories, shanty suburbs, or affluent neighbourhoods.
Meta said some accounts 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,” it stated.