Meta Takes Down 60,000 Accounts on Instagram to Disrupt Nigerian Extortion Ring

Online extortion scams can inflict severe financial pain on victims -- so much so that the FBI IC3 2023 Report noted over $74 million in damages.

In the digital realm, this type of crime knows no borders and has been continuously fueled by criminal groups that carry out their scams through social media platforms.

To combat this, Meta recently announced that it has removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that directly attempted to engage in extortion scams.

Many of these accounts were linked to the Yahoo Boys, an organized cybercriminal group that specializes in financial sextortion scams, among others.

“Like many crimes, financial sextortion crosses borders, and over recent years there’s been a growing trend of scammers — largely driven by cybercriminals known as Yahoo Boys — targeting people across the internet, both with these and other types of scams. We’ve banned Yahoo Boys under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy — one of our strictest policies — which means we remove Yahoo Boys’ accounts engaged in this criminal activity whenever we become aware of them,” Meta said.

Among the removed social media accounts, Meta also said it acted against a coordinated network of 2,500 accounts linked to a group of 20 individuals.

“They targeted primarily adult men in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta explained. “The majority of these accounts had already been detected and disabled by our enforcement systems, and this investigation allowed us to remove the remaining accounts and understand more about the techniques being used to improve our automated detection.”

During the cleanup phase, the company said it also removed 7,200 Facebook pages and groups based in Nigeria that were providing tips on how to conduct these crimes or sell scripts to other fraudsters. This includes 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook pages, and 5,700 Facebook groups.

“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,” Meta’s report reads.

“Since this disruption, our systems have been identifying and automatically blocking attempts from these groups to come back, and we continue to strengthen those systems to make them as effective as possible. We’ve also used the new tactics we observed to further improve our ability to detect accounts, Groups and Pages engaging in this activity. “

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