Facebook reports thousands of sextortion scams from Nigeria targeting American men
So-called sextortion scams are on the rise, with Nigerian criminals targeting mostly adult men in the United States, Meta reported Wednesday.
Two cell phones with the logos of Meta and Facebook, the social network and company owned by Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta confirmed Wednesday that it had eliminated about 63,000 Nigerian accounts that targeted people with financial sextortion scams. The operation involved posing as an attractive woman and tricking victims into sending nude photos of themselves. Upon receiving the photos, the scammers would threaten to publish them unless they sent money.
Meta has taken down 200 pages and 5,700 Facebook groups, all from Nigeria, that gave instructions for running such scams, for example advising how to talk to victims and offered scripts, as well as collections of photos that the scammers could use to impersonate someone else and create fake accounts.
Meta also said it found some of these accounts through new signals that were added to automatic detection tools to find malicious behavior. "First of all, this goes without saying that financial sextortion is a horrific crime and can have devastating consequences," Antigone Davis, Meta's global director of security told CBS News.
A recent study titled: "Trends in Financial Sextortion: An Investigation of Sextortion Reports in NCMEC CyberTipline Data" from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which analyzed more than 15 million reports made to CyberTipline between 2020 and 2023 to identify cases of sextortion and examine the scale and nature of financially motivated sextortion, claims that most sextortion scams originate in Nigeria or the Ivory Coast.
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Facebook reports thousands of sextortion scams from Nigeria targeting American men
VozMedia Staff
Meta said it found that scammers send out solicitations to many people and get few responses. Some of the Facebook accounts, pages and groups removed by Meta under its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, were run by Yahoo Boys, a cybercriminal group based primarily in Nigeria.
Davis advised users to pay particular attention to "if somebody sends you an image first, that is often to try to bait you to send an image second, or try to gain trust and build trust." He added that "this is one of those areas where if you have any suspicion, I would urge caution."
Based on the growth of this type of crime, the company advised reviewing Facebook Messenger privacy settings to filter the people that users can receive messages from or block people who are not their Facebook friends.
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