Meta deletes 63,000 accounts due to sexual extortion
The Meta conglomerate is deleting approximately 63,000 accounts, pages, and groups. They are all reportedly linked to "Sextortion" schemes. In these scams, criminals extort people using sex images. A group is said to be particularly responsible for an increase in this type of crime.
In the fight against sexual coercion and extortion on the internet, Meta, the online behemoth, has deleted around 63,000 Facebook accounts. According to the company, these accounts were created in Nigeria. Both groups and pages on the platform were also taken down, where alleged scammers were recruited and trained for so-called Sextortion.
Victims of this scheme are lured into sending explicit photos under the assumption they are chatting with peers. Once they have sent the photos, they are then extorted with threats of image publication unless they pay a specific sum or perform online sexual acts.
Recently, a case involving two brothers came to light in the US state of Michigan, who admitted to sexually exploiting and extorting teenagers and young men. One victim took their own life. The case of a sheriff's deputy from Virginia, who posed online as a peer to a 15-year-old girl, then killed her mother and grandmother and kidnapped the teenager, caused widespread shock.
Phenomenon also in Germany
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in Sextortion cases, for which the loosely organized group Yahoo Boys is partly blamed, operating mainly from Nigeria. An investigation revealed that most Sextortion attempts had failed. They primarily targeted adult men in the US, but minors were also among the victims. Cases involving minors were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Meta stated.
The phenomenon is not unknown in Germany. This was revealed at the end of 2023 by a survey of the German Press Agency among state criminal investigations. According to the survey, there were over 2,000 recorded cases in 2022. The police in North Rhine-Westphalia reported 785 such cases, labeled as "extortion based on sexual motives over the internet." In Lower Saxony, there were 109 cases, in Saxony-Anhalt 119, in Baden-Württemberg 308, and in the Saarland 19 cases. Nationwide figures are not available. Not all federal states collect such data.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has taken down a substantial number of accounts linked to Sextortion schemes from its platforms, primarily originating in Nigeria. These crimes have also been reported in the USA, with a case involving two brothers in Michigan leading to extreme consequences. Moreover, Sextortion is not confined to these countries; it has been a growing issue in Germany as well, with over 2,000 recorded cases in 2022 alone.
