Meta Platforms said on Wednesday it had removed about 63,000 Facebook accounts in Nigeria that attempted to engage in financial sexual extortion scams mostly aimed at adult men in the United States.

Nigerian online fraudsters, known as “Yahoo boys”, are notorious for scams that range from passing themselves off as people in financial need or Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on an investment.

Meta said in a statement the removed accounts also included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 that were linked to a group of around 20 individuals.

“They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” Meta said.

In sexual extortion, or “sextortion”, people are threatened with the release of compromising photos, either real or faked, if they do not pay to stop them.

The investigation showed that the majority of the scammers’ attempts were unsuccessful and although mostly targeting adults, there were also attempts against minors, which Meta reported to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the U.S.

The company said it had used a combination of new technical signals developed to help identify sex extortion.

Nigeria’s scammers became known as “419 scams” after the section of the national penal code that dealt – ineffectively – with fraud.

As economic hardships worsen in the country of more than 200 million people, online scams have grown, with those behind them operating from university dormitories, shanty suburbs or affluent neighbourhoods.

Meta said some accounts were providing tips for conducting scams.

“Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and guides to use when scamming people, and sharing links to collections of photos to use when populating fake accounts,” it said.

(Reuters)