Lagos: Meta Platforms announced on Wednesday that it has removed approximately 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria involved in financial sexual extortion scams, primarily targeting adult men in the United States.
These scams, orchestrated by Nigerian fraudsters known as “Yahoo boys,” are infamous for a range of deceptive tactics, including impersonating individuals in financial distress or claiming to be Nigerian princes offering lucrative investment opportunities.
In its statement, Meta revealed that alongside the removal of 63,000 Instagram accounts, it had also taken down 7,200 Facebook accounts, pages, and groups dedicated to scamming. The company noted that among the removed accounts were around 2,500 linked to a coordinated network of about 20 individuals.
“They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta said.
Sexual extortion, or “sextortion”, involves threatening victims with the release of compromising images—whether real or fabricated—unless they pay to prevent their dissemination.
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Meta’s investigation indicated that most of the scammers’ efforts were unsuccessful. Despite the focus on adults, there were also attempts to extort minors, which Meta has reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the U.S.
The company utilized newly developed technical signals to enhance its ability to identify sexual extortion schemes. Nigerian scammers have been dubbed “419 scammers” due to the section of the national penal code addressing fraud, albeit with limited success.
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As economic conditions deteriorate in Nigeria—a country with over 200 million people—online scams have proliferated. The perpetrators operate from various settings, including university dormitories, impoverished neighborhoods, and affluent areas.
Meta’s efforts also uncovered accounts providing advice on scamming, including selling scripts and guides and sharing links to photo collections for use in fake accounts.
