In addition to sites and organizations attempting to coordinate, enlist, and teach new con artists, Meta claims to have removed over 63,000 Facebook profiles involved in financial sextortion schemes in Nigeria.
When someone is threatened with having graphic photos made public, they are tricked into sending them online in exchange for money or sexual favors.
This tactic is known as sexual extortion, or sextortion.
Notable incidents in recent memory include a Virginia sheriff’s deputy who abducted a 15-year-old girl and two Nigerian brothers who admitted to sexually abducting teenage boys and young men in Michigan, one of whom committed suicide.
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.
Laptops 1000The 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.
Although the bulk of the fraudsters’ attempts, according to Meta’s analysis, failed and they primarily targeted adult men in the United States, the company did note that “some” of them attempted to target kids, which it reported to the National Centre 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 effort to combat sexual frauds and other types of “image abuse,” as well as to make it more difficult for criminals to contact teenagers, Meta is now evaluating these features.
