On Wednesday, Meta Platforms said it had taken steps to remove about 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that were found to be targeting people with financial scams.
“These included a smaller coordinated network of approximately 2,500 accounts that we were able to link to a group of approximately 20 people,” the company said in a statement. said. “They targeted mostly adult males in the US and used fake accounts to disguise their identities.”
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 had removed 7,200 assets, including 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook pages and 5,700 Facebook groups located in Nigeria, which were used to organize, recruit and train new fraudsters.
“Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and manuals for use in defrauding people, and sharing links to photo collections for use in populating fake accounts,” it said.
Meta attributed the second cluster to a cybercriminal group tracked as Yahoo Boyswhich came to light earlier this year for organizing financial sexual assaults on teenagers from Australia, Canada and the US
The following report is from Bloomberg exposed suicides caused by sexual extortion, revealing how scammers pose as teenage girls on Instagram and Snapchat to lure targets and trick them into sending indecent photos, which are then used to blackmail victims in exchange for money or the risk of forwarding their images to their friends.
Back in April, the social media giant said it has developed new methods to identify accounts that are potentially involved in sexual extortion, and that it is taking steps to prevent these accounts from finding and interacting with teenagers.
“Financial extortion is a horrific crime that can have devastating consequences,” Meta said. “It’s a competitive space where criminals are evolving to evade our ever-improving defenses.”
Meta’s actions came after Interpol said it had launched a global law enforcement operation called Jackal III, which targeted West African organized crime groups such as Black Axe, resulting in numerous arrests and the seizure of illegal assets worth 3 millions of dollars, including cryptocurrency and luxury goods. .
The effort, which ran from April 10 to July 3, 2024, covered 21 countries and was orchestrated with a purpose eliminate transnational criminal syndicates involved in cyber fraud, human trafficking, drug smuggling and violent crime both in Africa and around the world.
“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. said in a statement to the press.
The development also follows a wave of other law enforcement actions aimed at combating cybercrime –
- Vyacheslav Igorovich Penchukov (aka father and tank), who pleaded guilty earlier in the year for his role in the Zeus and IcedID malware operations awarded 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.
- Cyber police of Ukraine announced the arrest of two people in connection with attacks on financial theft aimed at “leading industrial enterprises” of the country, which entailed losses in the amount of 145,000 dollars (six million hryvnias). If they are found guilty, they face up to 12 years in prison.
- Spain’s La Guardia Civil arrested three suspected participants NoName057(16)prompting pro-Russian hacktivist group to to declare “holy war” against the country. The individuals were accused of participating in “denial-of-service cyberattacks against government institutions and strategic sectors in Spain and other NATO countries.” Group is called “witch hunt” arrests by the Russophobic authorities.
- UK National Crime Agency (NCA) said it infiltrated and took down digitalstress(.)su, a DDoS-for-hire (aka bootloader) linked to “tens of thousands of attacks every week” worldwide. The suspected owner of the site, which is called Skip, was also arrested. The liquidation, part of an ongoing coordinated effort called Operation PowerOFFcame after the German police is broken Stresser.tech DDoS attack service in April 2024.
