Meta removes 1,600 accounts linked to “Yahoo Boys”

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, says it has removed another 1,600 groups linked to “Yahoo Boy” from its platform.

The development comes three months after the company removed 63,000 accounts in Nigeria linked to sextortion scams.

In a statement released Thursday, Meta also announced that Instagram is taking steps to further protect people from sextortion.

“We removed approximately 1,600 Facebook groups and accounts affiliated with Yahoo Boys and were attempting to organize, recruit and train new scammers,” Meta said.

“This comes after we announced in July that we had removed approximately 7,200 Facebook assets with similar behavior.

“Yahoo Boys is banned under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Policy – ​​one of our strictest policies – which means we remove Yahoo Boys accounts engaged in this criminal activity whenever we see them. we know.

“While we have been removing infringing Yahoo Boys accounts for years, we are implementing new processes that will allow us to identify and remove these accounts more quickly.”

MEASURES TO PREVENT SCAMS

Meta said it has taken steps to prevent the activities of fraudsters.

This, the company said, involves hiding subscriber and following lists from potential sextortion scammers, preventing screenshots of certain images in direct messages (DMs), and rolling out our privacy protection feature. nudity on a global scale.

“These updates, part of a campaign informed by NCMEC, Thorn & Childnet, also aim to help parents feel better equipped to help their teens avoid these scams,” Meta said.

“Sextortion is a horrific crime, in which financially motivated scammers target young adults and teenagers around the world, threatening to expose their intimate images if they don’t get what they want.

“Today, we are announcing new measures in our fight against these criminals, including new security features to further help prevent sextortion on our apps, building on the protections already in place. »

To further protect people from sextortion and make it harder for criminals to succeed, Meta said, “we’re making it harder for accounts showing signs of potentially fraudulent behavior to ask to follow teens.”

“Depending on the strength of these signals – which include the newness of an account – we will block the follow request completely or send it to a teen’s spam folder,” the company added.

Meta also said that sextortion scammers often use their targets’ following lists and followlists to try to blackmail them.

The company said potential scammers would not be able to see people’s followers or following lists, accounts that have liked someone’s posts or other accounts that have been tagged in their photos.