A significant crackdown by Meta against a well-known sextortion group operating from Nigeria has resulted in the removal of nearly 70,000 cumulative profiles, pages, and groups from Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, measures to prevent them from returning have been strengthened.
Meta said these accounts were linked to the “Yahoo Boys,” a well-known group of scammers. The Yahoo Boys relied on the classic “Nigerian prince” scam, in which they attempted to defraud naïve individuals by promising riches. However, recently, they have turned to romance scams, in which they create profiles to trick their victims into giving up money or personal information to maintain a relationship.
Alternatively, as demonstrated by Meta’s most recent campaign, they use personal photographs to trick their victims into giving up money.
They have also been highly active, particularly on Instagram.
As per Meta:
“About 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts that attempted to participate directly in financial sextortion scams have been deleted by us. These included a small coordinated network of approximately 2,500 accounts that we could link to a group of approximately 20 individuals. They mostly preyed on adult males in the US, hiding their identities behind fictitious accounts.”
63k profiles is a lot, and you can see how this group might try to intimidate targets with such a large-scale coordinated effort.
Furthermore, Meta reported that it discovered a coordinated network consisting of approximately 2,500 accounts using a combination of new technical signals and procedures.
“Most of these accounts had already been detected and deactivated by our enforcement systems, and this investigation helped us understand more about the techniques we use to remove the remaining accounts and improve our automated detection.”
So we have to go along with Meta’s plan, and now we can learn how Yahoo Boys and other groups coordinate and work together to put pressure on Meta users. While it’s a different matter if you cannot increase your views, you should choose the Buy Instagram Views India service, which more users have taken.
This will put Meta in a better position to prevent similar incidents in the future, but as is always the case, as the detection system advances, so do the tactics used by these groups. While it’s still a cat-and-mouse game, Meta appears to prevail in some of the bigger, more significant (large-scale) incidents overall, according to its continued reporting.
Furthermore, Meta has eliminated 5,700 groups and 1,300 Facebook profiles from its platforms. These groups were also linked to the Yahoo Boys Collective. Which provided information to other users on how to make money online.
“They attempted to defraud people by sharing links to photo collections and offering to sell scripts and instructions for scammers to use when creating fake accounts.”
The more accessible the online world, the more vulnerabilities there are, sextortion and romance scams are some of the worst types of online crime because they target vulnerable and depressed people and promise you something that is never fulfilled. So we don’t need to fall for them. Of course, all scams prey on vulnerabilities, but these programs seem particularly vicious, so it’s encouraging to see Meta taking extra action to crack them down.
While scammers have evolved since the advent of AI, they now have a different factor to launch their schemes.
We hope that Meta will continue to evolve its systems accordingly to maintain balance across its platforms.
