Meta Banned 63,000 Accounts: The meta-owned company, Instagram reported that it has removed 63,000 that were involved in sextortion scams in Nigeria.
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Most of the accounts were scammers disguised as womens in the United State and this announcement was declared in a blog from Meta on Wednesday.
These types of scammers especially target young teens by pretending to be young women online and manipulate them to send their sexually explicit content and then blackmails them.
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Meta Removed 63,000 sextortion accounts on Instagram in Nigeria
These online scammers are known as ‘Yahoo boys,’ a group of Nigerian hackers that makes themselves look like people who need money.
Several people who were scammed by sextortion have killed themselves because they felt so ashamed and stressed.
In the blogpost Meta also noted that along with removing 63,000 accounts, the company also removed 7,200 Facebook accounts, and groups that shared scamming tips.
In the blogpost, the company said, “Financial sextortion is a horrific crime that can have devastating consequences.”
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The company has also removed a network of about 2,500 that were linked to a group of 20 people that did similar types of scams.
Meta told the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about these types of scammers who especially targets adults and also there are reports of them targeting childrens.
As per the reports, a 16-year-old Murray Dowey from Dunblane killed himself after he was the victim of these sextortion scams in May.
In a Senate hearing in February 2024, the U.S. lawmaker said that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and other social media such Tiktok leaders had “blood on their hands,” as they did nothing to protect the kids from sexual scams on their platform.
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Economic Times reported that Nigeria’s scammers were called “419 scams” after the country’s penal code tried to stop fraud but failed.
In April, Meta also introduced a feature that will not show the “message” button on a teen’s profile to accounts that it believes are involved in sextortion scams.
Online scams have grown drastically in the country of more than 200 million people. These scammers are especially from universities, and poor areas.
However, Meta is trying its best to remove as many accounts as possible to prevent sextortion scams.
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