LAGOS, Nigeria - Meta has taken decisive action against a network of Instagram accounts involved in sextortion scams. The social media giant announced the removal of approximately 63,000 accounts registered in Nigeria that were connected to these illicit activities. These included one network of 2,500 accounts that were linked to a group of about 20 people.
The rise of sextortion scams has increased pressure on social media companies like Meta to clamp down on cybercrimes committed on their platforms, especially targeting children.
Some of the accounts taken down by Meta were also working to recruit and train others to join the scams and offered manuals on how to commit them.
Meta said the majority of attempts on its platforms were unsuccessful and that they mostly targeted adults. The FBI says a rapidly growing number of children in the United States have become targets, especially teenage boys - with sometimes tragic consequences.
Seventeen-year-old Jordan DeMay was one such victim of sextortion. A popular high-school senior from Michigan, his mother Jennifer Buta told NPR her son loved to play sports, music.
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"He was easy going, fun-loving, hardworking," she said. But in 2022, he died by suicide after he was targeted by scammers based in Nigeria.
Over a period of six hours, the teenager was lured into an online exchange on Instagram and tricked into sending explicit photos of himself.
"It was so callous and heartless," Buta told NPR. Buta welcomed Wednesday's action by Meta, but said more should be done.
"I hope that other social media platforms look at Meta's example and start doing this like this on their platforms. Because at the end of the day, if they are allowing this to happen on their social media platforms they are an accessory to this crime because they are allowing this to happen."
In June, FBI Director Chris Wray visited Nigeria, in part to urge the country's authorities to do more. It was the first known visit by an FBI director to Nigeria and he told NPR that the issue of sextortion was at the forefront of his discussions, including with the President Bola Tinubu.
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"We're talking about kids between 10 and 17 years old, typically, but we've even seen victims as young as 7 years old. And one of the things that makes this crime so heartbreaking and difficult to detect is the victims are afraid and embarrassed," Wray said.
Cybercrime is a prominent but complicated issue in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, where residents are also suffering from online scams and from the response of Nigerian police, who are often accused of rights abuses.
DeMay's mother says she will continue to share her son's story. "If I can reach one person, that might be one life that is saved because of what happened to Jordan," she says.
Financial sextortion is a horrific crime that can have devastating consequences. Our teams have deep experience in fighting this crime and work closely with experts to recognize the tactics scammers use, understand how they evolve and develop effective ways to help stop them.
Like many crimes, financial sextortion crosses borders, and over recent years there’s been a growing trend of scammers - largely driven by cybercriminals known as Yahoo Boys - targeting people across the internet, both with these and other types of scams.
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First, we removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that attempted to directly engage in financial sextortion scams. These included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts that we were able to link to a group of around 20 individuals.
We found the coordinated network of around 2,500 accounts through a combination of new technical signals we’ve developed to help identify sextorters and in-depth investigations by our expert teams.
While our investigation showed that the majority of these scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful and mostly targeted adults, we did see some also attempt to target minors, and we’ve reported those accounts to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Since this disruption, our systems have been identifying and automatically blocking attempts from these groups to come back, and we continue to strengthen those systems to make them as effective as possible.
While these investigations and disruptions are critical, they’re just one part of our approach. We continue to support law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting these crimes, including by responding to valid legal requests for information and by alerting them when we become aware of someone at risk of imminent harm, in accordance with our terms of service and applicable law.
We also fund and support NCMEC and the International Justice Mission to run Project Boost, a program that trains law enforcement agencies around the world in processing and acting on NCMEC reports. We also want to help people recognize and avoid these scams, while making it as difficult as possible for the criminals behind them to succeed.
We also recently announced that we’ve developed new signals to identify accounts that are potentially engaging in sextortion, and are taking steps to help prevent these accounts from finding and interacting with teens. This is an adversarial space where criminals evolve to evade our ever-improving defenses.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, in the United States: Contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 9-8-8, or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
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