Meta said Wednesday that it had taken down about 63,000 accounts in Nigeria that were engaging in sextortion scams.   

Sexual extortion, or sextortion, is blackmail where criminals threaten to release explicit photos of someone — either real or fake — unless the victim pays money or engages in sexual favors.

The social network said the scams were mostly aimed at people in the United States and that the accounts were from its Instagram platform; an earlier report said Facebook accounts were deleted. Meta owns Instagram, Facebook and the WhatsApp messaging platform.

"They targeted primarily adult men in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities," Meta said.

The company's investigation showed that the majority of the scammers' attempts were unsuccessful.

Who are being targeted?

Although they mostly targeted adults, there were also attempts against minors.

Meta said it reported these cases to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States.

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

The move comes months after the FBI warned of a "huge increase" in sextortion cases targeting children. 

The targeted victims are primarily boys between the ages of 14 to 17, but the FBI said any child can become a victim.

What's behind the rise in scams?

The rise in sextortion cases in recent years is fueled in part by a loosely organized group called the Yahoo Boys, operating mainly out of Nigeria, Meta said.

The firm removed the Instagram accounts and groups run by the group under its "dangerous organizations and individuals" policy.

The removed accounts included a smaller "coordinated network" of about 2,500 accounts linked to a group of about 20 people who were running them, Meta said.

In April, Meta announced it was deploying new tools on Instagram to protect young people and combat sexual extortion.

It also planned to include a feature that will automatically blur nudity in direct messages.

Meta is still testing out the features as part of its campaign to fight sexual scams and other forms of "image abuse," and to make it tougher for criminals to contact teens.

sri/sms (Reuters, AP)