Meta Removes 1,600 Accounts Linked to ‘Yahoo Boys’

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, has announced the removal of an additional 1,600 groups connected to ‘Yahoo Boys’ from its platform. This move comes just three months after the company had eliminated 63,000 accounts in Nigeria tied to sextortion schemes.

In a statement released on Thursday, Meta also revealed that Instagram is introducing new features aimed at enhancing protection against sextortion. “We have removed approximately 1,600 Facebook Groups and accounts associated with Yahoo Boys, who were trying to recruit and train new scammers,” the statement read.

This follows Meta’s July announcement, in which the company said it had taken down around 7,200 Facebook entities engaged in similar fraudulent activities. “Yahoo Boys are prohibited under our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, one of our strictest guidelines, meaning we remove any accounts linked to such criminal activities whenever they come to our attention.”

Although Meta has been consistently removing Yahoo Boys-related accounts for years, the company stated it is implementing new strategies to expedite the identification and removal of these accounts.

Meta also emphasized the introduction of preventative measures against scammers, including hiding follower and following lists from potential sextortion perpetrators, preventing the ability to screenshot certain direct messages, and globally launching its nudity protection feature. These initiatives, informed by NCMEC, Thorn, and Childnet, are part of a broader campaign designed to help parents guide their teens in avoiding these scams.

“Sextortion is a devastating crime where scammers, driven by financial motives, target teenagers and young adults globally, threatening to leak intimate images if their demands aren’t met,” Meta said. “Today, we’re unveiling additional tools in our ongoing battle against these criminals, building on the protections already in place.”

To make sextortion efforts less successful, Meta is also introducing tougher restrictions for accounts that display warning signs of suspicious behavior when attempting to follow teens. Based on the severity of these signals, such as how new the account is, Meta may block the follow request entirely or divert it to the teen’s spam folder.

Additionally, Meta noted that sextortion scammers often exploit the follower and following lists of their targets as a method of blackmail. The platform will now prevent potential scammers from viewing these lists, as well as limiting visibility of accounts that liked a post or were tagged in someone’s photos.