Meta Takes Swift Action Against Sextortion Scammers Targeting Young Male Users
Facebook’s parent firm Meta has taken swift action against sextortion scammers that are targeting young male users having social media accounts based in Nigeria.
A new report sheds light on how the accounts are targeting men in the form of sextortion scams to get financial gains. So far, the company has managed to delete at least 1300 accounts on Facebook and more than 200 pages on the same app. Meanwhile, 5700 Facebook groups were also eliminated that were said to be based in Nigeria. The latter were giving ‘expert’ tips on how to carry such scams out.
The giant group of threat actors and scammers were dubbed Yahoo Boys and were involved in gathering, hiring, and even training so many scammers. This entailed offering a large number of scripts and guides for rolling the scams out and sharing links to bigger groups featuring images when targeting bigger fake accounts on the app.
Such scams include requests rolled out for pictures and criminals then opting to threaten users by sharing them if their needs were not met.
A few months back, we saw Meta claim it was rolling out a new array of tools that were designed to protect young users from viewing unwanted pictures that were of an explicit nature. These again arose from a similar set of threats linked to sextortion.
Meta shed more light on how their own investigation done internally on the app proved how most of the incidents were not successful and even those that did, they targeted adult males. But that does not mean there were no reports of younger users getting trapped along the way too. The latter was an alarming finding and therefore was immediately reported to the NCMEC.
Another incident featured 63K accounts on the Instagram app that were based in Nigeria again and entailed a smaller network of nearly 2500 accounts which Meta said belonged to 20 people. Again, the main target audience in this case was male adults in the US who had fake accounts that masked their identities.
Meta says this space is where criminals are evading their defenses which do improve with time but simultaneously, threat actors are also getting more advanced, using tactics that evade the company’s tactics to ensure they’re one step ahead of all others.
Meta hopes to work closely with activists and other safety experts including law enforcement agencies to combat such criminal activities throughout all of its apps online.
Meanwhile, the FBI has rolled out new warnings in terms of how the figures for such cases keep increasing and entail both teenagers and kids. There are some situations where the goal is to persuade victims and produce more pictures, in return for money. The latter is the biggest motive of these criminals.
If demands are not met, the sextortion resorts to threats and blackmailing that releases user content online unless victims roll out funds or gift cards. In some shocking cases, the criminals still release the content, despite getting the payment. The user is left with no choice but to face mental distress and in some situations, they end up taking their own lives in the end.
While Meta has confirmed that they are doing everything in their power to combat the act, the growing number of incidents have left a lot of questions in people’s minds about whether or not they’re doing enough to put an end to the disturbing behavior.
Image: DIW
Read next: TikTok Fined For Inaccuracies In Its Parental Safety Controls Data
