Meta, on Wednesday, announced that it had taken down approximately 63,000 Nigerian Facebook accounts attempting to engage in financial sexual extortion scams targeting adult men in the United States.
The parent company of Facebook disclosed in a statement that the deactivated accounts also included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 that were linked to a group of around 20 individuals, Reuters reported.
“They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta said.
Nigerian online fraudsters, commonly known as ‘Yahoo Boys’, are notorious for scams that range from passing themselves off as people in financial need, Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on investment, or even disguised men and women seeking to find true love with foreigners, amongst others.
In sexual extortion, or “sextortion”, people are threatened with the release of compromising photos, either real or fake, if they do not pay to stop them.
The…
Source: Leadership Newspaper
