[Source: Reuters]

Meta Platforms opens new tab and said it had removed about 63,000 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 Platforms (META.O), opens new tab said on Wednesday it had removed about 63,000 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.

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

Meta representatives said this was not the first time they had disrupted such networks, but added they were disclosing the current operation to “drive awareness.”

The social media giant has been on the defense in recent years as governments, including legislators in the United States where Meta is based, ramp up pressure on it to address concerns that its executives have ignored evidence that its services harm children.

In a hearing earlier this year, one U.S. lawmaker accused Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and other social media leaders of having “blood on their hands” for failing to protect children from escalating threats of sexual predation on their platforms.

The U.S. Surgeon General has also called for a warning label to be added to social media apps as a reminder of those harms.

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