Meta announced major action against known sex extortion groups operating in Nigeria, resulting in the removal of approximately 70,000 profiles, pages and groups from Facebook and IG, and increased measures to prevent them from being removed again.
According to Meta, the accounts were linked to a fraud ring known as the “Yahoo Boys.” The group originally relied on the old “Nigerian prince” type of scam, tricking unsuspecting targets with promises of money, but more recently they have switched to romance scams, creating fake profiles and convincing targets to share money or personal information to stay in a relationship.
Or, as in Meta’s latest endeavor, they use intimate images to extort money from their victims.
And they are very active especially on IG.
According to Meta:
“We have taken down approximately 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts that were attempting to directly engage in financial sextortion scams. These included a smaller coordinated network of approximately 2,500 accounts that we were able to link to a group of approximately 20 individuals who were primarily targeting adult males in the United States and using fake accounts to hide their identities.“
63,000 profiles is a huge number, and it’s easy to imagine how this group could attempt to use a coordinated effort of this magnitude to intimidate targets.
In addition to this, the meta is also Note that it was detected A network that integrates approximately 2,500 accounts. New technological signals and processes.
“While the majority of these accounts had already been detected and disabled by our enforcement systems, this investigation allowed us to further understand the techniques used to remove the remaining accounts and improve our automated detection.”“
So, essentially, Meta was able to use this project to learn more about how the Yahoo Boys and other groups work together in tandem to exert pressure on users.
Ideally, Meta will be in a position to prevent the same thing from happening in the future, but as always, as detection systems improve, so do the tactics these groups deploy. It’s an ongoing game of cat and mouse, but overall, based on ongoing reports, it appears that Meta has been able to gain an advantage in some of the larger and more impactful (larger) instances.
In addition to In addition to these profiles, Meta also removed 1,300 Facebook profiles and 5,700 groups that were providing tips on how to carry out online scams, and which also appear to be linked to the Yahoo Boys gang.
“Their activity included offering to sell scripts and guides to use in scamming people, and sharing links to photo collections to use in creating fake accounts.”
Sextortion and romance scams are some of the worst types of online crime; they target vulnerable and desperate people and promise them things that never come true. Of course, all scams prey on weakness, but these types of programs seem especially cruel, which is why it’s good to see Meta taking further steps to stamp out these scams.
However, fraudsters have evolved, and in the age of AI, there are entirely new vectors they can utilize to carry out their plans.
Hopefully, Meta will be able to evolve their system accordingly and maintain some sort of balance in enforcement.
