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 said in a statement on Wednesday that the removed accounts also included a smaller coordinated network of around 2,500 that were linked to a group of around 20 individuals.
"They targeted primarily adult men in the US and used fake accounts to mask their identities," Meta said.
After Niger fined Meta
The investigation showed that the majority of the scammers' attempts were unsuccessful and although mostly targeting adults, there were also attempts against minors, which Meta reported to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US.
The announcement by Meta comes just days after Nigeria fined the company $220 million after investigations showed data-sharing on social platforms violated local consumer, data protection and privacy laws.
Nigeria's Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) said Meta appropriated the data of Nigerian users on its platforms without their consent, abused its market dominance by forcing exploitati ve privacy policies on users, and meted out discriminatory and disparate treatment on Nigerians, compared with other jurisdictions with similar regulations.
In taking down thousands of accounts in Nigeria, Meta said it had used a combination of new technical signals developed to help identify extortion.
'Teaching scams'
Nigeria's scammers became known as "419 scams" after the section of the national penal code that dealt - ineffectively - with fraud.
As economic hardships worsen in the country of more than 200 million people, online scams have grown, with those behind them operating from university dormitories, shanty suburbs or affluent neighbourhoods, Reuters news agency reports.
Meta said some accounts were providing tips for conducting scams.
"Their efforts included offering to sell scripts and guides to use when scamming people, and sharing links to collections of photos to use when populating fake accounts," it said.
➤ Click here to follow our WhatsApp channel for more stories.
