Teenagers from Western English-speaking international locations are more and more focused by monetary sextortion assaults carried out by Nigeria-based cybercriminals, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) has discovered.
A majority of those occur on social media platforms like TikTook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Wizz.
Financial sextortion, the unlawful act of adults manipulating minors, or different adults, into sharing sexually suggestive content material on-line to extort their cash, is essentially the most quickly rising crime focusing on youngsters within the US, Canada, and Australia, a brand new NCRI report mentioned.
In October 2023, the FBI reported a 1,000% enhance in monetary sextortion incidents within the US over the previous 18 months. This prompted a number of US authorities businesses to launch a nationwide Public Safety Alert on the explosion of the risk.
Canada and Australia are observing an identical development, with their home regulation enforcement businesses receiving between 200 and 300 complaints per thirty days, respectively.
Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz, Top Sextortion Platforms
According to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), social media is the platform of selection for these sextortion schemes to unfold.
Specifically, the next three apps are the highest platforms for sextortion:
- Snapchat
- Wizz
Instagram, which doesn’t provide a characteristic to cover your connections, is the most typical vector that sextortion criminals use to focus on their victims, the NCRI report mentioned.
“Specifically, practically all monetary sextortion assaults on minors contain the screenshotting of the sufferer’s Instagram followers/following lists and utilizing these lists as leverage, threatening to ship the sufferer’s intimate photographs to all these accounts,” the report mentioned.
Snapchat is most incessantly used to coerce victims into sending a compromising picture as soon as the attacker has gained the belief of his victims.
“Snapchat is the popular app by criminals as a result of its design options present a false sense of safety to the sufferer that their photographs will disappear and never be screenshotted,” the NCRI mentioned.
The third social media app most used for sextortion functions, Wizz, can also be the quickest rising. This Tinder-like relationship platform focusing on younger youngsters (13+) is owned by the French group Voodoo.
“In the Google Play Store and the App Store, dozens of minors have reported that they had been coerced into producing self-generated baby sexual exploitation materials (SG-CSEM) and blackmailed on Wizz – alongside different baby security issues, together with a excessive frequency of complaints that the app is serving pornographic adverts to minors,” the NCRI researchers noticed.
Nigerian Cybercriminals Behind the Surge
Almost all this sextortion exercise comes from Nigeria-based cybercriminals referred to as ‘Yahoo Boys’, NCRI reported.
Their typical strategy is to “bomb” excessive colleges, youth sports activities groups and universities with faux accounts, utilizing superior social engineering techniques to coerce their victims right into a compromising scenario.
Although they aren’t essentially a part of a structured cybercriminal group, Yahoo Boys did begin sharing their data with one another.
The sextortion surge noticed within the US, Canada and Australia is “a direct end result” of this knowledge-sharing, NCRI concluded.
However, little has been shared concerning the people particularly concerned within the present monetary sextortion surge.
“To date, there are solely three recognized indictments of those criminals in court docket information and public reporting,” mentioned the report.
Who Are the Yahoo Boys?
The time period ‘Yahoo Boys’ began for use within the early 2000s to discuss with financially motivated younger Nigerians conducting phishing scams – an exercise generally referred to as ‘yahoo yahoo’ or ‘419 fraud’ in Nigerian slang – utilizing Yahoo.com e mail addresses.
They are the unique ‘Nigerian Princes,’ who’ve shifted in recent times to conduct aged fraud, faux job scams, and romance scams.
Despite what some studies typically point out, Yahoo Boys should not a part of one unified cybercriminal group however kind a nebulous subculture group. Although they may share suggestions and methods, they usually function individually or structured in small teams.