Meta takes down thousands of Facebook, Instagram accounts running sextortion scams

There has been a marked rise in sextortion cases in recent years, fueled in part by a loosely organized group called the Yahoo Boys, operating mainly out of Nigeria.

By Barbara Ortutay | The Associated Press

Meta said Wednesday that it has taken down about 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria running sexual extortion scams and has removed thousands of Facebook groups and pages that were trying to organize, recruit and train new scammers.

Sexual extortion, or sextortion, involves persuading a person to send explicit photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or engages in sexual favors. Recent high-profile cases include two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teen boys and young men in Michigan, including one who took his own life, and a Virginia sheriff’s deputy who sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl.

There has been a marked rise in sextortion cases in recent years, fueled in part by a loosely organized group called the Yahoo Boys, operating mainly out of Nigeria, Meta said. It added that it applied its “dangerous organizations and individuals” policy to remove Facebook accounts and groups run by the group.

“Because they’re driven by money, they’re targeting can be indiscriminate,” said Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety. “So in other words, think of this as a little bit of a scattershot approach: get out there and send many, many, requests out to individuals and see who may who may respond.”

In January, the FBI warned of a “huge increase” in sextortion cases targeting children. The targeted victims are primarily boys between the ages of 14 to 17, but the FBI said any child can become a victim.

Meta said its investigation found that the majority of the scammers’ attempts did not succeed and mostly targeted adult men in the U.S., but added that it did see “some” try to target minors, which Meta says it reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The removed accounts included a “coordinated network” of about 2,500 accounts linked to a group of about 20 people who were running them, Meta said.

In April, Meta announced it was deploying new tools in Instagram to protect young people and combat sexual extortion, including a feature that will automatically blur nudity in direct messages. Meta is still testing out the features as part of its campaign to fight sexual scams and other forms of “image abuse,” and to make it tougher for criminals to contact teens.

Davis said users should look out for messages from people with “highly stylized” photos, people who are “exceptionally good looking” or have never sent you a message before.

“That should give you pause,” she said. Users should also take a pause if somebody sends an image first — scammers often use this tactic to try to gain trust and bait unsuspecting people into sending them back a photo of themselves.

“This is one of the one of these areas where if you have any sort of suspicion, I would urge caution,” she said.