Meta Platforms announced on Wednesday that it has taken steps to remove about 63.000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that were found to be targeting people with financial extortion scams.
"These included a smaller coordinated network of about 2.500 accounts that we were able to connect with a team of about 20 people," the company said. "They mainly targeted adult men in the US and used fake accounts to cover their identities," he said.
In cases where some of these accounts attempted to target minors, Meta said it reported them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Separately, Meta said it also removed 7.200 assets, including 1.300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook pages and 5.700 Facebook groups based in Nigeria, which were used to organize, recruit and train new fraudsters.
"Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and guides used when scamming people and exchanging links to photo collections used when filling out fake accounts," it said.
Meta attributed the second cluster to a cybercrime group identified as the Yahoo Boys, which came under fire earlier this year for orchestrating financial extortion attacks targeting teenagers from Australia, Canada and the US.
A subsequent report by Bloomberg exposed suicides fueled by sextortion, revealing how scammers impersonate teenage girls on Instagram and Snapchat to lure targets and trick them into sending explicit photos, which they then use to blackmail victims with in exchange for money or risk having their image taken
"The annual operation resulted in approximately 300 arrests, the identification of more than 400 additional suspects and the freezing of more than 720 bank accounts," INTERPOL said in a statement.
The development also follows a wave of other law enforcement actions from around the world aimed at tackling cybercrime,
- Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov (aka father and tank), who pleaded guilty earlier this year to his role in the Zeus and IcedID malware operations, was sentenced by a US court to nine years in prison and three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $73 million in restitution.
- Ukraine's cyber police have announced the arrest of two people in connection with financial theft attacks targeting the country's "top industrial enterprises", resulting in losses of $145.000 (six million hryvnias). If convicted, they face up to 12 years in prison.
- Spain's La Guardia Civil arrested three suspected NoName057(16) members, prompting the pro-Russian hacktivist group to declare a "holy war" on the country. The individuals are accused of participating in "denial-of-service cyber-attacks against public institutions and strategic sectors of Spain and other NATO countries." The group called the arrests a "witch hunt" by Russophobic authorities.
- The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) said it has penetrated and taken down digitalstress[.]su, a DDoS-for-hire (aka booter) service linked to "tens of thousands of attacks every week" globally. The suspected owner of the site, who goes by the name Skiop, was also arrested. The seizure, part of an ongoing coordinated effort dubbed Operation PowerOFF, came after German police shut down DDoS attack service Stresser.tech in April 2024.
