The parent company of Facebook, Meta, announced that it had deactivated about 63, 000 accounts in Nigeria that were involved in financial sextortion scams. These scams often involve the offender pretending to be an attractive woman and convincing the victim to send them naked pictures. Once they get these images, they proceed to post them online and demand that a ransom be paid to prevent them from being shared.
Apart from these profiles, Meta also surpassed 7,200 other resources, such as 1,300 Facebook profiles, 200 pages, and 5,700 groups. These resources were employed to carry out the scams, providing tips, sample conversations, and links to image galleries for identity impersonation.
Meta found that most financial sextortion attempts were aimed at adult men in the US, but the level of success was relatively low. Nevertheless, they did identify some cases that involved minors, and these were promptly forwarded to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
Financial sextortion, like many other criminal activities, is not limited to any specific country. It has become widespread recently to see people being scammed globally, with these fraudsters being mainly young Nigerian cyber fraudsters referred to as Yahoo Boys. These fraudsters perpetrate several scams, such as the recently popularised financial sextortion.
Sextortion scams are commonly romance scams, with Nigeria’s involvement in online romance scams in Africa. Moreover, mobile games are also a popular target for scammers more and more often.
In response to this, Meta is exploring new technology to prevent people from falling prey to sextortion scams. One feature currently under experimentation is the auto-blur feature in Instagram’s direct messages that blurs images in private messages if they contain nudity.
