Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Nigeria is keen to help crack down on internet extortion scams after Meta’s removal of thousands of fake Nigerian Instagram and Facebook accounts put a spotlight on how to protect vulnerable young people online.The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the country’s anti-corruption watchdog, told the Financial Times it was willing to work with global law enforcement to arrest Nigerian-based suspects.“There’s no safe haven for anyone committing such crimes in Nigeria as far as the EFCC is concerned,” commission spokesperson Dele Oyewale said last week.The social media giant this summer axed more than 63,000 fake accounts, including a “co-ordinated network” of 2,500 accounts linked to 20 individuals, for their role in a growing issue known as “sextortion”. The spread of sextortion, which has prompted some victims to turn to suicide in the most extreme cases, has alarmed authorities, particularly in the US. Social media groups, meanwhile, face a conundrum on how best to safeguard their most vulnerable users. “Financial sextortion is a rising and very serious threat targeting our minors nationwide,” Cheyvoryea Gibson, special agent in charge of the FBI in the US state of Michigan, where one of the most extreme cases of sextortion took place, said in a statement in April.The perpetrators use fake accounts to pose as young women and contact their would-be victims, usually young men and boys. Online conversations often turn flirty, quickly, as the scammers solicit sexually explicit images from their targets and then try to extort money under threat of sharing the images with their families. The fraudsters use search engines such as Google and other online tools to research their victims, including where they live and work, according to the FBI. Meta has also taken down thousands of Facebook groups, accounts and pages that were providing tips to scammers. “Yahoo Boys”, those behind the accounts, are an amorphous group of young, mostly male, internet fraudsters who have operated out of Nigeria for decades.The tech group said it found other accounts involved in sextortion in Ivory Coast. Perpetrators are also active in south-east Asian countries such as the Philippines, according to the FBI.Between October 2021 and March 2023, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security received more than 13,000 sextortion reports. These schemes involved at least 12,600 people, most of whom were boys. “Victims are typically males between the ages of 14 to 17,” according to the FBI.The FBI pointed specifically to a 20 per cent increase in reporting financially motivated sextortion incidents involving minor victims over the six-month period to March 2023 compared with the same period the previous year. The threat has prompted law enforcement agencies to warn parents and young people of the dangers of engaging in risky online behaviour.“We encourage the public to have open and honest conversations with their loved ones surrounding sextortion and to take heed of the warning signs,” the FBI’s Gibson said. Some victims part with hundreds of dollars after days of bargaining with their tormentors. At least 20 of those who were extorted have taken their own lives.Three Nigerians, including two brothers, were behind a scheme to “sexually extort numerous young men and teenage boys in the Western District of Michigan and across the United States”, according to an FBI indictment dated May 2023. The brothers, Samuel Ogoshi 22, and Samson, 20, who were extradited to the US a year ago from Lagos and are now in the custody of US marshals, pleaded guilty in April to one count of “conspiring to sexually exploit teenage boys” in the Michigan district as well as across the US.The Ogoshis will be sentenced later this year, according to the US Department of Justice. The elder Ogoshi initially faced charges surrounding the death of Jordan DeMay, a 17-year-old school student in Michigan.DeMay was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 25 2022. He had been contacted by the Nigerian scammers posing as a teenager with the Instagram account “dani.robertts”, which the FBI would later determine was part of a wider conspiracy that hacked accounts belonging to young women and girls.There was no “dani.robertts”. DeMay was corresponding with Ogoshi, said the FBI indictment, which charged Ogoshi alongside his brother, Samson, and a third man, Ezekiel Ejehem Robert, who was 19 at the time. Samuel Ogoshi, using the “dani.robertts” account, cajoled DeMay into sending a sexually explicit image of himself. The extortion began not long after.“I have screenshot all ur followers and tags can send this nudes to everyone and also send your nudes to your Family and friends Until it goes viral . . . All you’ve to do is to co-operate with me and I won’t expose you,” Ogoshi wrote via the fake account, according to the FBI indictment.The account demanded $1,000 from DeMay. The teenager could only muster $300. He was again threatened with exposure.The offence the Ogoshi brothers pleaded guilty to carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years, with the maximum double that. The extradition of the third defendant, Robert, is working its way through the Nigerian system.The FBI credited the co-operation of Nigerian law enforcement, including the EFCC, in apprehending the men.“A case of sextortion was reported” [to the EFCC], Oyewale told the FT. “It was professionally followed, charges were drawn, extradition was achieved and the cases are still ongoing.” Nigeria’s justice ministry, which is dealing with the extradition process, did not respond to requests for comment.Many countries, including the Ivory Coast, where other scammers are based, have no extradition treaties with the US, making it difficult for authorities to arrest perpetrators abroad.Video: Nigeria’s struggle to break the ‘oil curse’ | FT Film
