Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has reportedly deleted about 1,600 Facebook groups linked to fraudsters popularly known as ‘Yahoo Boys’.
This development was disclosed on Thursday by Meta which said, “We removed around 1,600 Facebook Groups and accounts that were affiliated with Yahoo Boys, and were attempting to organize, recruit and train new scammers.
“This comes after we announced in July that we’d removed around 7,200 Facebook assets that were engaging in similar behaviour.
“Yahoo Boys are banned under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy — one of our strictest policies — which means we remove Yahoo Boys’ accounts engaged in this criminal activity whenever we become aware of them.
“While we’ve been removing violating Yahoo Boys accounts for years, we’re putting new processes in place which will allow us to identify and remove these accounts more quickly.”
The company also disclosed the introduction of improved safety features designed to protect users of their platform, especially teenagers from sextortion scams.
These features includes blocking suspicious accounts from following teens, blurring images containing nudity, preventing the screenshotting or recording of ephemeral images and videos.
Recall that in July, the company deleted about 63,000 accounts linked to sextortion scams.
The company said, “Sextortion is a horrific crime, where financially-driven scammers target young adults and teens around the world, threatening to expose their intimate imagery if they don’t get what they want.
“Today, we’re announcing new measures in our fight against these criminals – including new safety features to further help prevent sextortion on our apps, building on protections already in place.
“We’ll continue to evolve our defences to help protect our community from sextortion criminals. This includes helping teens and their families recognize these scams early, preventing potential scammers from reaching their targets, and working with our peers to fight these criminals across all the apps they use.”
